**Number 1 Sunday Times Bestseller**In a world not quite like this one, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing has achieved an astonishing breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In an alternative 1980s London, Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans.

With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong...

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
 

2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.

Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.

When he stumbles...