P and Youo

Port Hollis, Washington, 1974. In a damp attic above a mill town that smells of pulp smoke and rain, a thin, shaking man named P sits on the floorboards with a slate-gray wand across his knees and a particle accelerator humming inside a lard tin. Nobody in town knows he was once emperor at the end of time, ruling a palace moored to the last black hole in a universe gone cold. Nobody knows the voice that keeps him company is Youo, the machine mind that fell with him. And nobody knows he would give anything to make all these people go away.

To get home, P has to rebuild an impossible machine from stolen telephone copper and a schoolroom crystal, outrun a timber baron who has been waiting for him since 1931, and survive the fury of his own future self, a sovereign four centuries ahead who wants his ancestor erased. But the road back runs through more than time. It runs through a bakery on Albion Road, a girl in a mustard cardigan who lies to the police for him, and a cheap mantel clock with one broken tooth that refuses to keep perfect time.

From the rain-soaked Cascades to the frozen thrones of deep time and the burning heart of the galaxy, *P and Youo* is a sweeping, intimate science fiction novel about power, solitude, and the small, flawed, human things that turn out to hold everything together.