Digital List Price:	$7.99
Kindle Price:	$7.49 Save $0.50 (6%)
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Ian McDonald

Follow

Desolation Road Kindle Edition

by Ian McDonald (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 106 ratings

See all formats and editions

Locus Award
Winner, 1989 - First Novel

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$7.49

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$149.99

$95.00

Paperback

"Please retry"

$9.58

$8.82

$8.80

Kindle
$7.49 Read with our free app
Hardcover
from $95.00

1 Used from $95.00 1 New from $149.99 1 Collectible from $125.00
Paperback
$9.58

7 Used from $8.80 11 New from $8.82

It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality; from Adam Black’s Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel), to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town’s founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child – grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with – and married – the same woman.

REVIEWS
“Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road is one of my most personally influential novels. It’s an epic tale of the terraforming of Mars, whose sweep captures the birth and death of mythologies, economics, art, revolution, politics… Desolation Road pays homage to David Byrne's Catherine Wheel, to Ray Bradbury's entire canon and to Jack Vance, blending all these disparate creators in a way that surprises, delights, then surprises and delights again.” – Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing)

“McDonald’s first novel, it absolutely bowled me over when it came out, and while I have read everything he’s published since, and admire all of it and like most of it, this remains my favourite... some of the most beautiful prose imaginable… If you ever want to demonstrate how different science fiction can be, what an incredible range and sweep of things are published with a little spaceship on the spine, Desolation Road is a shining datapoint, because it isn’t like anything else and yet it is coming from a knowledge of what the genre can do and can be and making something new out of it.” – Jo Walton (Tor.com)

“This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do. Desolation Road is a rara avis... Extraordinary and more than that!” – Philip José Farmer

“Flavoured with a voice that blends the delightful prose of Jack Vance with the idiosyncratic stylings of Cordwainer Smith, this novel is, most of all, about the dusty town of Desolation Road in the middle of the red Martian desert. Episodic in scope, it would also work as short stories. An elderly couple get lost in the infinite space of their garden, a baby growing in a jar is stolen and replaced with a mango, a man called The Hand plays electric guitar for the clouds and starts the first rain for one hundred and fifty thousand years.” – SF Site

Print length

366 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

January 30, 2014
File size

1389 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Ian McDonald
45
Kindle Edition
$7.99
Ian McDonald
1,357
Kindle Edition
$9.99
Ian McDonald
139
Kindle Edition
$15.99
Ian McDonald
733
Kindle Edition
$11.99
Ian McDonald
50
Kindle Edition
$5.99
Ian McDonald
22
Kindle Edition
$7.99

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

ea. vol: Spectra: Bantam. Feb. 1988. sf Founded by accident in the Martian desert by a scientist obsessed with the nature of time, the town of Desolation Road grows from a whistle stop on the Bethlehem Ares Railroad to a stronghold of freedom ranged against the ROTECH bureaucracy. The loves, hates, and intrigues of the town's residents come to life and build to a vivid climax in this compellingly executed novel. In Empire Dreams , McDonald's craft as a storyteller takes on smaller dimensions but remains intact. Ranging from the inner torment of Vincent Van Gogh ("Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh") to a young boy's private battle for life in modern Belfast ("Empire Dreams"), the author finds evidence of the fantastic in unlikely settings. Both books are highly recommended. JC
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"Flavoured with a voice that blends the delightful prose of Jack Vance with the idiosyncratic stylings of Cordwainer Smith, this novel is, most of all, about the dusty town of Desolation Road in the middle of the red Martian desert. Episodic in scope, it would also work as short stories. An elderly couple get lost in the infinite space of their garden, a baby growing in a jar is stolen and replaced with a mango, a man called The Hand plays electric guitar for the clouds and starts the first rain for one hundred and fifty thousand years." --SFSite

"Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of the books that has influenced me the most as a writer. Funny and sad and wildly imaginative... What a book!" --Cory Doctorow

"This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do. Desolation Road is a rara avis... Extraordinary and more than that!" --Philip José Farmer --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00I5WATHO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. (January 30, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 30, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1389 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 366 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1591027446

Best Sellers Rank: #1,195,788 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,272 in Steampunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #2,663 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #5,802 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 106 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Ian McDonald

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

106 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Keith E. Eppich

It's good.

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2023

It's good.

So weird, so beautiful

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is a hard one to review. It's so far from the standard narrative. It's like Canterbury Tales by Ray Bradbury in Mayberry. You get vignettes of peoples lives in this town through the generations, and they are SO crazy and interesting. But you are also flitting around, like EVERY chapter for the first 20 or so is meeting some new people. And then their kids come around, and grandkids. But, it's all such an amazing whirlwind, full of magic.

I loved the book, I'd call it a sci-fi must read. But, interestingly enough, I see by other reviews that there is a lot of disagreement on the topic, so who knows?

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Ed Rybicki

Strange....

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

I know this is an early work by Ian McDonald: yes, it is clever; yes, it is fearfully well written; yes, like the later Brasyl it has you hanging on breathlessly to see what happens next.

Is it good? Hmmmmm...too clever by half, one could say. A little too fond of its progression of the hour-and-minute reiterations of times that things happen, too in love with its own complexity and inner darknesses.

And MUCH too fond of getting rid of characters one had just started to like.

So: good, but flawed - and a useful signpost to the brilliance to come in maturity and age.

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Bought this book as used paperback decades ago and loved it. I've re-read this many times

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Bought this book as used paperback decades ago and loved it. I've re-read this many times, picking up new things each time I go through it. It's complex and deep, but an easy and fun read. It's definitely a weird perspective, so I understand those who don't find it appealing. But even though I'm mostly a fan of hard science fiction, I found this mix of SF/fantasy to be just right. Haven't ever read anything else like it. I'm an engineer and my wife is a English major, and we both loved it.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

E. N Ritchie

Engaging, but lightly wanting

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2009

Verified Purchase

I was drawn into Desolation Road immediately and enjoyed the book. It begins as an intimate, slightly fey, story of misfits on a terraforming Mars finding a place for themselves in as yet undeveloped stop on a desert railway.

But as it progresses towards the end it drags and what was an engaging story of a small society of misfits loses focus when the stories scope expands.

I became increasingly disinterested as the story seemed to become less about the characters and more about the wider world around them.

I don't think, as some reviewers say earlier, that this is McDonalds best work. I think his stories set in future India ('River of Gods' and attendant short stories) are much better.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

David J Roche

STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL...

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

My biggest regret is that I'll never be able to read this book for the first time again. This book has it all world development, great characters ,more than a dash of magic realism . It engages the reader from the first page to the last. I am retired, and have read more than a few books, this book would be in my top ten desert island book list. Now to choose my next book by the inestimable Ian McDonald.
(and look for the occasional green person).T
his book is recommended for the reader of any genre who is looking for a fascinating piece of literature.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Amethyst64

Amazing...

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2019

Verified Purchase

A convoluted history of the town of Desolation Road, or maybe a history of the convoluted town of Desolation Road. Full of pathos, humor, physics, mythology, greed, war and time travel. Keeping a family tree of all the characters in the book helps to follow the plot.

Helpful

Timothy J. Cliffe

Filled to the brim with ideas. Really quite interesting ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

Filled to the brim with ideas. Really quite interesting combination of the late 19th/early 20th century and a fairly distant future. But I could not really care about any of the characters, and it seemed implausible how many of them became monstrous. Event piled on event to the point that I got tired out before the end.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

P. G. Harris

1100100 Years of Solitude

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

I was about a quarter of my way into this book when Ian Macdonald’s modus operandi finally dawned on me (I can be spectacularly unobservant). If one asks the question What if George R Martin wrote sci-fi, the answer might well be Macdonald’s Luna trilogy. If the matter in hand is Salman Rushdie writing a cyberpunk novel, the conclusion is Macdonald’s River of God’s. Here, gloriously we have Macdonald’s take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez writing a novel about the terraforming of Mars.

This is a great big sprawling picaresque novel about the rise and fall of a small settlement far out in the desert of a mars made suitable for human habitation. It is very definitely an SF novel with planetary engineering, cybernetic development, time travel, futuristic weaponry, fusion powered trains and climate control technology. There is even, as the novel careers towards its conclusion, a strong nod in the direction of HG Wells, as three legged fighting machines stride across a battlefield obliterating enemy combatants with heat rays.

It is however written in a beautiful, lyrical style far from the voice of pulpy shoot em up science fiction. The book is full of echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, starting with being the whole life story of an isolated settlement. From there Macdonald gives us complex, ever shifting romantic relationships, family feuds, a young woman who becomes an angelic figure, heartless industrialism, rebellion and guerrilla warfare, all topped off with a healthy dose of magical realism.

Like the earlier work, this is not a linear narrative with a single filament, but a tapestry which creates a holistic picture in both space and time, indeed there is a character at its heart weaving the story as it develops around her.

So, is this plagirism? I would say no more so than West Side Story, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

SilverfaceCosmicman

Meh!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2022

Verified Purchase

A combination of New Wave SF and Magic Realism! I should've loved it, but found it over stylised and containing too many characters. I enjoyed what I read but couldn't get further than half way. One to come back to, I think...

Adrian L.

Really enjoyed this book - well written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

Really enjoyed this book - well written, imaginative, engrossing, but not too heavy or pretentious. Will have to buy more by this author for an extended holiday planned this summer.

2 people found this helpful

Ventura Angelo

Douglas Adams meets Tom Robbins

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2001

Verified Purchase

Zany combinations of a genetically rewired humanity,when the strange drift of fate and desire brings togheter fascinating and cryptic personae in a hyperrealistic martian desert.A masterpiece of the imagination.I'm savouring it slowly,to appreciate the melancholic,Sheckleyan twang of McDonald's intriguing writing. If you want to read a VERY good modern S.F. book on Mars,read this book.

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

Desolation Road Kindle Edition

Customers who bought this item also bought