The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond
by Jeffrey Ford
An epic masterwork about the trials of a man of "science" in a Kafkaesque realm of persecution and paranoia from a World Fantasy Award–winning author. The Well-Built City is a hellish place of unrelenting nightmare, ruled with cruelty, oppression, and terror by the inscrutable madman Drachton Below. In his multiple-award-winning, New York Times Notable trilogy, Jeffrey Ford creates a dystopia that chronicles the hubris, downfall, and damnation of a highly placed functionary responsible for determining who will live or die according to their facial structure. The Physiognomy: With his unimpeachable authority to condemn and destroy, the pompous, drug-addicted Cley is one of the most feared civil servants in Drachton Below's Well-Built City. But when the Master himself dispatches him to a remote mining town to recover a stolen object of unimaginable power, events will cause the physiognomist to doubt his science and the reality of his...