The Coffin of Honey - by Geoffrey D Morrison (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.

At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician's speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another's orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about "the interdimensional will to the aesthetic" - a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.

The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.

Review Quotes

Praise for the author:

'A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page.' - Mauro Javier Cárdenas, author of Aphasia

'There is impressive control in the deployment of these mind spirals, with Morrison integrating link after link into a narrative that grows more complex but keeps all its many balls in the air, the kind of juggler who satisfies and surprises with what he is able to toss into the mix.' - Emily McBride, The Rumpus, on Falling Hour

'From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh's sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a "fake" country.' - André Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn

'Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation - a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end.' - Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon

'In Falling Hour, an immensity is condensed into a single day, a single park, a single empty frame. To themes of loss and dispossession that recall in scope and sensitivity the work of Teju Cole and W.G. Sebald, Morrison brings the attentive eye of a poet and a truly impish sense of the absurd.' - Jen Craig, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire

beautiful and terrible in human life. Falling Hour is more than just the record of a character's thoughts over the course of a day; it is a kind of literary ghost bicycle chained to the spot where a cyclist was killed, an anthem of the defeated, a howl of rage at a violent machine. It is also, I'm afraid to say, a masterpiece.' - André Forget, Literary Review of Canada

'Falling Hour deserves mention as a notable debut along the estuary of modern fiction.' - D. W. White, Atticus Books, Phoenix, AZ

'In Falling Hour, Geoffrey D. Morrison's impressive first novel, a ruminative young man named Hugh Dalgarno takes an old picture frame to a public park where he has an appointment to sell it to a stranger.' - Kevin Canfield, Necessary Fiction

'It is rare to come across a debut novel that feels so unapologetically intellectual and, at the same time, so alive to what is

'Falling Hour is an existential feast, a satisfying banquet of innovative fiction, ripe with free-flowing associations that astound, all with the cohesion of a lucid dream.' - Danial Neil, The British Columbia Review

'Falling Hour is a densely woven text of rhythmic sentences and shifting metaphors, of righteous rants about colonialism, capitalism, and Methodist-minded Canadians, of lyrical meditations on the natural world, of facts that beget more facts. Reading it broke my brain, and I mean this as the highest compliment.' - Marisa Grizenko, Plain Pleasures

'The perks and pleasures are innumerable in this, the memories of the disgruntled protagonist on a single, lonely day.' - Brett Josef Grubisic, Vancouver Sun, on Falling Hour

'Morrison offers a tender portrayal of loneliness amidst the ravages of late capitalism, where everything, including the most basic forms of human relation, have been subsumed under market logic.' - Aaron Obedkoff, Canadian Notes & Queries, on Falling Hour

About the Author

Geoffrey D. Morrison is a language teacher and trade unionist who lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. His debut novel, Falling Hour (Coach House Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The Coffin of Honey is his second novel.