From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and organic near-future thriller merging history, research, magic, mystery, intrigue, and experience that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, a specialist in linguistics and languages, accidently matches military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons within a hallway at Harvard University or college, it’s the beginning of the chain approximately The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Book of events which will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy authorities entity methods Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an unbelievable offer. The just condition: she must sign a nondisclosure contract in return for the rather large amount of cash.

Tristan requirements Mel to translate some very aged records, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They show that magic in fact been around and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the medical revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its professionals. Magic stopped functioning altogether in 1851, during the fantastic Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace-the world’s fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about today’s world ‘jams’ the ‘frequencies’ used by magic, and it’s really up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations-D.O.D.O. -gets breaking on its genuine mission: to build up a tool that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his growing operation get better at the technology and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial-and treacherous-nature from the human being heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize most of Neal Stephenson’s function and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland’s storytelling style, this interesting and vividly noticed function of science fiction can make you genuinely believe in the impossible, and consider you to places-and times-beyond imagining.