The Seven Hills

Description

A murder on Arthur’s Seat. A missing sister. Jess must find her before the police do, as the voices she hears lead her from Edinburgh’s first eruptions to a future beyond humanity. An epic, deeply human novel by the bestselling author of the Skelfs series and The Space Between Us

Jess Livingstone knows the Edinburgh tourists never see. She guides visitors through the underground vaults, sleeps in a squat and relies on medication to quieten the voices in her head that have frightened her since adolescence.

Then her younger sister, Holly, disappears after Holly’s boyfriend is found dead on Arthur’s Seat. The police suspect Holly, so Jess has to find her before they do. Her search takes her through the dark corners, tourist traps and contested neighbourhoods of the city she knows so well, leading to powerful figures with murderous secrets. Meanwhile, the voices in her head grow harder to ignore, and begin to help in her quest.

The voices belong to the seven hills of Edinburgh: ancient, curious, amusing and bickering, who can take the form of trees, rats, gas molecules, museum objects – anything. Through them, Jess moves across time: among dinosaurs and prehistoric hunters, beside a woman condemned as a witch, into unimaginable near and far futures. One small piece of volcanic pitchstone acts as Jess’s talisman as she passes between these worlds, linking human and other lives to the relentless story of the land.

Jess’s search for her sister becomes a desperate race across deep time – from the first eruptions of Edinburgh’s volcanic hills to a future hundreds of millions of years beyond humanity. Blending gritty noir with a breathtaking speculative scope, The Seven Hills is a vast, genre-bending epic. At once funny, tense, uncanny, and profoundly moving, it pitches one young woman’s desperate, vital love for her sister into the immense, unending story of life on Earth.