Cover

About the Book

Alaska, 2018, and Mike is a long way from home, nursing a wrecked knee and an unspoken grief, striking out into real estate and parenting his partner’s son. London, 1978, and Simon is an Australian fish out of water navigating adolescence during the Winter of Discontent, and drawn to an eccentric impresario next door. Washington, DC, 1928, and a retired US senator is interviewed about his time in Russia in 1916, and his mission to save a young heir to an empire. Vienna, 1809, and an Irish teenager on the run from the law takes refuge among composers as Napoleon besieges and shells the city. Hong Kong, 2019, and estranged brothers Mike and Simon reunite in midlife to face the secrets of the past, and reconnect in more ways than one.

Empires rise and fall, human lives play out, encounters, collisions and connections occur more than we can ever know – and yet, the unexpected can still happen.

EMPIRES is a masterful novel in five parts with boys and men at its heart. Spanning centuries and crossing continents, it explores the empires we build, the way we see ourselves, the narratives we construct and the interconnectedness of all things.

Epigraph

‘What is history but a fable agreed upon?’

Napoleon Bonaparte (so the fable goes)

2018

Girdwood, Alaska

We are told not to judge the surface of things – that the truth lies deeper – and yet we judge surfaces all the time.

A defeated butcher’s-block benchtop, faded and scored. A paper-towel dispenser anchored to the wall, showing spots of rust around its screws. A varnished pine board where the white subway-tile backsplash should go. A kitchen summed up in its three loudest cries for help.

My life has had too much HGTV in it this past summer, too many nights of the renovations of forgettable others seeping into my pores. Our pores. Lacy’s as well as mine. The two of us, tucked away in our own small piece of the Girdwood twilight and then dark, watching Vancouver, Nashville, Waco – across North America, bright-eyed renovators bustling in with their Pantone colour swatches and their sledgehammers and futures all mapped out.

But they don’t know, because you can’t know. What’s behind that old drywall. What’s after tomorrow, after this minute. It amounts to a show because it doesn’t all go to plan. It’s a slice of life because of that, too. It’s relatable. The TV renovators tend to get their happy endings, though – a higher percentage of the time than in real life, by my estimate. They are glad they have endured, and are rewarded for it. It comes across as cause and effect, and there’s less of that neat association in life than there should be.