Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a London suburb the colour of a sunset, two poets quarrel — one who worships order and one who preaches anarchy — and out of that quarrel Gabriel Syme, a policeman with the soul of a poet, is swept into the strangest secret society in the world: the Central Anarchist Council, whose seven members are known only by the days of the week. Syme takes the empty chair of Thursday — and finds himself sitting down to breakfast, high above Leicester Square, with the vast and terrible President called Sunday. So opens the wildest chase in English literature, and one of its most dazzling puzzles.

G. K. Chesterton subtitled his 1908 masterpiece A Nightmare, and it moves with the logic of one: a thriller of bombs and disguises that keeps turning inside out, each unmasking stranger than the last, until pursuit becomes something like a pilgrimage. Beneath the paradoxes and the laughter runs a question the book will not let go of — why the world is so frightening, and whether the terror at its heart might, just possibly, be wearing a mask of its own.

It is a story to be enjoyed first as sheer adventure — the sword-duel that ends in absurdity, the flight across a France gone mad, the impossible chase by elephant and balloon — and puzzled over ever after.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, the map of Syme's nightmare, and its great scenes; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the tale so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and walk into the sunset of Saffron Park.