Pollen

<b>From the front flap of the Crown HB edition:</b> "Even Napalm cigarettes aren't going to help if it's 4 a.m. and your black cab is off the legal maps. No amount of money is going to justify the trip if you have to beat the Zombies back into the city and your fare has just appeared, a young girl who smells like a garden in the springtime. Because you've just started sneezing and it feels curiously good... <p>Coyote was the best black-cab driver of all time, picking up passengers where others were afraid to drive. Now he's the first fatality of the Pollination, the first to fall victim to the massive cloud of pollen that has descended upon a remixed and futuristic Manchester. Amid vicious blooms and a soaring pollen count, people are sneezing themselves to death. Only a very few are immune to the fever, and two of them - shadow-cop Sibyl Jones and her wayward daughter Boda - must travel separate paths into the darkness to find the seed that has spread the nightmare. What they find there will forever alter the ancient relationship between mankind and the myths it creates to make sense of the world. <p>In his award-winning first novel, Vurt, Jeff Noon explored the urban future with a dimension-bending feather called Vurt, a new world where dreams and drugs seep into reality. Now, there is much more at stake: one mysterious murder, new pollen deaths daily, and a city in desperate need of saving. Pollen combines a classic detective story with a lyrical and bold look at the cyberfuture and the mythical realities that threaten a society on the edge."