The Kingdoms

Joe Tournier has lost nearly all of his memory. His earliest recollection is of stepping off a train in nineteenth-century England, a country that in this history belongs to France. His only clue to who he is comes in the form of a century-old postcard showing a Scottish lighthouse, which reaches London in the same month he does. It is written in English, a language that has been banned, and it is signed with nothing but the letter M. Joe is convinced the writer knows him far better than he knows himself, and he is determined to track them down.

The search takes him from London under French control to Scotland, where rebels hold the land, and then onto the warships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. The story is a time-bending alternative history, and it poses a hard question: is it right to change the past in order to save the future, even if the cost is every person you have ever loved? Joe's journey will reshape the course of history and reshape him as well.