Conquest

Conquest is a layered literary mystery that winds through love, obsession, and the human need for meaning. Frank Landau, an anxious but brilliant programmer who hears the world’s pulse as music, disappears after a trip to Paris with a band of true believers. Rachel, the partner who loves him fiercely, refuses to accept he has simply walked away. Robin Clay, a former London detective with her own haunted past, agrees to look for Frank and finds herself drawn into a ring of cultural critics, artists, and scientists convinced that something alien has already infiltrated our ecosystem. Their ideas are not shouted; they seep in through Bach, through films and essays, through a long-forgotten science fiction novella called The Tower.

Set between south London, Scarborough’s sea-swept hotels, and a Highland town called Tain, the story folds fiction, concert review, and critical essay into a narrative that feels like a single voice thinking aloud. The result is a meditation on conspiracy and care—how a belief can hold a life together, and how it can quietly take it apart. Nina Allan’s characters are intimate, flawed, and bracingly real, even as the edges blur and two possible futures unfurl.

• Listeners who like literary mysteries that blur genres and reward close attention
• Fans of narrative nonfiction, music writing, and stories that think in public
• Anyone curious about how conspiracies mimic religion—and how love resists them

Nina Allan is a British writer known for precise, genre-bending fiction that blends the uncanny with everyday life. Her books include The Silver Wind, The Dollmaker, The Rift, The Good Neighbours, and The Race. A critic as well as a novelist, she often writes about how art, memory, and technology shape identity. Conquest continues her exploration of stories that hold both the real and the speculative in the same steady breath.