<p>The Great Plague destroyed Europe. Now the world&#8217;s a different place &#8230; From the award-winning author of the Mars trilogy, &#8216;the ultimate in future history&#8217; (Daily Mail), comes the most ambitious alternate history novel ever written.</p>
<p>As Bold Bardash, a horseman in the army of Temur the Lame, rides west across the steppe and on to the Magyar Plain, he comes across a town in which everyone lies dead. Long dead. Plague has struck Europe. Kali&#8217;s black blanket has fallen over the lands of the West and nothing will ever be the same again.</p>
<p>Into this empty land pour the opportunists: the merchants, slavers and warlords. The Chinese cross the oceans in their huge fleets; the Arabs traverse the deserts by camel and mule and the mediterranean by dhow. The last Europeans are killed or enslaved &#8211; consigned to the seraglios of the sultans. So die the ancestors of Da Vinci and Copernicus; Columbus and Machiavelli; the Spanish Inquisition and the Conquistators; Shakespeare, Newton and the Pilgrim Fathers; Einstein and Hitler. And the world becomes a different place.</p>
<p>In this extraordinarily ambitious, poetic and powerful novel, Kim Stanley Robinson takes us on a journey through seven hundred years of history as it never was, but might have been.</p>