Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Bantam Spectra, 362 pp, $12..00

Other books by this author include the Arabesk series.

From Marrakech to Chins’s Forbidden City, from a doomed starship to an island prison camp the fate of the worlds is being played out in the minds of two dreamers. One, the would be assassin of a US president, the other a Chinese emperor ruling thousands of years in the future on a world as yet undiscovered. Each believes he is dreaming the other, one must change the future, the other the past..

Caught up in the storm are Moz, the Marrakech street punk, Jake Razor, the self exiled rock star, and Katie Petrov, a dying psychiatrist who must pry the secret out of her condemned patient, a secret with the power to save the future.

Fast paced, a thriller set in the moment with characters you care about, fully realized in their moment, and a tangled web of interrelationships that come to startling conclusion. Are the past and future really dreams? Written with such caring irony and prose, I don’t know if I wish there were more Grimwoods, or simply treasure the one we have. I look forward to many more books. - Pam Allan