Moon Over Brendle, by Jeff Noon
1 Jul 2026The Book
Synopsis:
Magical contemporary fantasy meets fantastical memoir in the new novel from a cult favourite, Jeff Noon.
1968, Joe Sutter is enjoying his last summer before going to secondary school. But this is another world; like ours but very different. Beyond and beside the world we know is Greot; a vast swirling rainbow of many-coloured dust. It settles on the dead, it swathes cities and fields. Joe is one of the 10% of the population who have the gift of being able to see it. But neither he or nor anyone else know what Greot is. Is it the trillion-eyed god? Is it the history of everything told grain-by-grain? Is it prophecy? Is it the magic of creativity?
Joe knows he is something of an outsider, all he wants to do is draw comics and listen to music but one day, as the moon rises over Brendle hill, he meets an old writer of cheap pulp SF books who is determined to pass on to Joe the power and joy of telling stories and everything changes. Decades later Joe is a successful writer of strange and powerful SF novels. And now the time has come to tell the story of how he became a writer and how Greot coloured everything.
My Review
Moon Over Brendle is an imaginative and very British-infused magical contemporary fantasy novel written by Jeff Noon, published by Angry Robot Books. Written in the style of an imaginary autobiography, Noon takes the opportunity to put the spotlight on the intrinsical magic that is associated with the creative process, adding an extra layer of childhood nostalgia, but with a written style that allows readers from different backgrounds to enjoy it.
Joe Sutter has been writing novels for a long time, but with this manuscript, Moon Over Brendle, he pretends to capture how the summer of 1968 changed his life, how finding two strangers mutated his vision of the world, and moreover, a story about Greot and the ways it makes the world unique. A story that showed how those people helped him to open the eyes to a new, infinite world, that made life even more incredible and magical.
Noon starts by weaving quite a nostalgic setting, a 1960s community, fully analogue, all making the effort to put us in the shoes of young Joe, a kid who see the Greot, the small and weird detail that makes this world different from ours; from this Greot is from where Noon will create the events that will shape the story, that slowly will draw the weird elements of the story, and more importantly, puts that effort of portraying how the creative can see the world in ways that could be almost described as magical.
At the end, we have the Noon's version of a coming of age story, in this case, of how Joe becomes a writer; all enveloped in really elegant writing, mimicking how old Joe is the narrator of our story. Many details are vividly painted, similar to how Greot looks to those that have the ability to see it.
It's not a long book, so you can just trust the author to take you on a marvelous journey, even if you don't understand many things at the start.
It's difficult to capture what I felt while reading Moon Over Brendle, so my best advice is to pick the book and enjoy by yourself; an ode to the creative process that has the signature style of Jeff Noon!
The Author/s
Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon was born in Manchester, England in 1957. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active on the punk scene before starting to write plays for the theatre. His first novel, VURT, was published in 1993 and went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He had written many books since then, each one exploring the ever-changing borderzone between genre fiction and the avant-garde. If a label is needed, he thinks of his work as being part of the Avant Pulp movement. He believes the modern world can only be portrayed in all its complexity by using new forms and techniques. To this end, he has often taken ideas and methods from musical composition and production, applying them to short stories and novels. Above all, Jeff sees himself as a storyteller. His plays include WOUNDINGS and THE MODERNISTS for the theatre, and DEAD CODE: GHOSTS OF THE DIGITAL AGE for radio. He also writes screenplays and lives in hope of actually seeing one of them produced, one day soon! Jeff lives in Brighton and Hove. He writes microfictional "spores" more or less every day via @jeffnoon on Twitter.