Second Coming (Hardcover)

Dr Miles Wallace is a thirty-something biology lecturer and a leading - if rather undervalued - expert on the Urodela (that's salamanders and newts). To his students he is, to all intents and purposes, already an old man. Almost out of the blue, comes an invitation to act as a consultant for the powerful multinational Heavy Metals, whose operations around the globe appear to be having some surprising not to say disturbing environmental effects. There follows a summer's work in the hothouse environment of Sierra Leone and Miles's life seems to be beginning all over again ... Starting out as campus comedy, Second Coming quickly flies in unexpected directions, as Miles finds himself faced with situations remote indeed from the humdrum realities of college life from jungle warfare in South-East Asia and groundbreaking discoveries of strange new animals to an apocalyptic interspecies struggle in Amazonia. Clever, witty, gripping and surreal, Second Coming is at once an adventure story and a thought-provoking novel of ideas.