The Time of the Seventh Angel
by David Gurr
A prophetic thriller spanning global conflict, secret power, and the fragile edge between hope and annihilation.
About the Book
IT BEGINS WITH A DISTURBANCE no intelligence system can explain. A mysterious stranger appears in Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s secret police fall to their knees. Then, a U.S. nuclear command bunker is breached. A red line has been crossed.
The nerve centres of Washington and Moscow, entrusted with power, are facing an adversary they can neither define, nor contain.
THE INEXPLICABLE RELEASE of an imprisoned Nobel Prize cancer scientist from behind the Iron Curtain raises questions that unsettle political and religious circles alike. Tensions escalate. The language of modern warfare is forced to battle something older: divine prophecy.
AWAKENING THE BOOK OF REVELATION, Gurr crafts a novel as intellectually ambitious as it is suspenseful. This is a work for readers who appreciate fiction that challenges and lingers, where the central question is indeed the very survival of our humanity itself.
The Seventh Angel has sounded. We have been warned.
Acclaim for the previous works of DAVID GURR
David Gurr’s political thrillers have been ranked with those of John Le Carré, Len Deighton and Graham Greene. His literary works have been called a tour de force. His writing refuses to be pigeon-holed.
“Gurr's novels truly deserve the care and patience they ask of the reader.”
David Foster Wallace.
“Wildly audacious. It may put readers in mind of Thomas Pynchon … Original, entertaining, brilliantly inventive.” Publishers Weekly
Author’s Note at the Age of 90
My dear Readers: I started this prophetic fiction when Mikhail Gorbachev was not in power; the Berlin Wall still stood; the Cold War seemed to have no end; and the scourge called AIDS was doubly terrifying, with extreme prejudice directed to its victims, and no cure. Ronald Reagan saw a new dawning for America, but a large chunk of New York real estate was a burning ruin. In Ukraine, the Soviet KGB were conducting a pogrom against dissidents and intellectuals trying to speak out against domination from the Kremlin. My previous thrillers had been well received: my writer's life was flourishing. Then, personal circumstances changed abruptly. I set this manuscript aside.
That was half my lifetime ago.
These forty five years later find the democratic world, and Ukraine, only just emerged from the black bat apocalypse called Covid, and still facing the Kremlin opponent whose coming — and even his name — my yellowed manuscript predicted. And America is still trying to solve the impossible problem posed by the ideals of its founding Constitution: Equality for all, versus Absolute Monarchy.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Sword of Damocles above us all rests on an even more slender trigger: the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists has just been reset at 84 seconds to midnight: an Artificially Intelligent world that finds us—and America's dream of itself—somewhere between Dr. Strangelove and Paradise Lost.
This book, with its foreboding Prophecies of the Angels, sets out the signposts on the route to 9/11 — and beyond it, humanity’s all too current choice between Armageddon or Redemption.
We are indeed in The Time of the Seventh Angel.
About the Author
David Gurr was born in London, 1936, and emigrated from Britain to Canada with his parents at Christmas, 1947. He enrolled as a cadet in the Royal Canadian Naval College, HMCS Venture, in 1954, and later obtained a degree in Mathematics, Physics, and Political Science from the University of Victoria.
After driving destroyers and analyzing computers for the Navy, he resigned his commission in 1971 to launch a career designing and building unique West Coast houses. He began writing fiction and published his first novel, Troika, in 1979.
The Time of the Seventh Angel is the ninth book published under his own name.
He currently lives with his wife, Diane Tolomeo, in a house and garden suitably modified to enjoy the climate, fauna and flora of Victoria, British Columbia. In any odd moments remaining he dances the Argentine Tango.
Further details may be found at
www.davidgurr.ca.
