Child of the River:: The First Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy)

An Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner for his novel Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley designs and fabricates remarkably intricate worlds. He builds some out of solid bricks of science, some from granite carved from the rich quarry of human history and experience. All are marvelous constructs of invention and thought; enthralling landscapes to wander, explore and lose oneself in.

He offers now a world that stands distinctly apart: a place of savagery, secrets and war; the home of ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines ruled by universal devotion to absent gods; a realm of merchants, mercenaries, ghouls, heretics, bureaucrats and feral machines; a world called Confluence.

Child Of The River is the first book of the end times; the beginning chapter in the final great epic of a mysterious civilization. In it, a singular young man named Yama makes his way from a ghostly city of the dead to a metropolis of living wonders, and through the labyrinthine country

Child of the River tells the story of Yama, a young man of unique heritage in a world of genetically altered beings. The river world Confluence is a place of crumbling, ancient cities and machines so old and mysterious they seem like magic. From the vast necropolis of Aeolis to the engimatic metropolis of Ys, Yama seeks the truth about himself, and the universe. With Child of the River, McAuley begins a trilogy examining the death of a breathtakingly epic civilization. --Therese Littleton