Echo Cycle

Gladiator meets 1984 in this near-future thriller featuring timeslips, ancient magic and a disturbingly plausible dystopian Britain...One day, a boy fell down a hole in time and banged his head. When he woke up he met the Emperor Nero, who promptly killed himself. 2070. A dozen English public schoolboys on a school trip to Rome in a prosperous and technologically advanced Europe worlds away from a post-Brexit Britain marred by food shortages, poverty and a totalitarian state. Outsider Miliband Monk is captivated by the gleaming metropolis, and desperate to stay out of the way of his tormentors, who bully him for his sexuality in ultra-conservative Britain, and longs for what he sees as the liberal utopia of modern Europe. When a life-changing shock leads him to pound a bullying classmate and dramatically injure him, and Monk flees into the city, and vanishes completely.Twenty-five years later, Monk's best friend Banks...