Fractured Europe 1: Europe in Autumn

'Europe in Autumn' is a thriller of espionage and the future which reads like the love child of John le Carre and Franz Kafka. Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he s trapped in, a new career - part spy, part people-smuggler - begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation "Les Coureurs des Bois," Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue. With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...


"Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn, presents a near-future Europe fractured into hundreds of nations or "polities", each with its own strictly controlled border. The Les Coureurs des Bois is a shady organisation which delivers packages, and sometimes people, across these borders. Estonian chef Rudi, working in Krakow when the novel opens, is drawn into the organisation and finds himself embroiled in ever more complex situations. Hutchinson draws a convincing picture of a fragmented continent - he's especially good at describing the industrial wasteland of the former Poland - as Rudi finds his life under threat. Unable to trust anyone, especially Les Coureurs, Rudi attempts to work out who wants him dead, and why. The author's authoritative prose, intimate knowledge of eastern Europe, and his fusion of Kafka with Len Deighton, combine to create a spellbinding novel of intrigue and paranoia." --The Guardian

"One of the most sophisticated science fiction novels of the decade: a tour-de-force debut, pacey, startlingly prescient, and possessed of a lively wit that never fails to convince and charm its readers." --LA Review Of Books