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Where the Axe Is Buried

A Novel

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks

"It takes just the right narrator to weave a story of the world ending. Eunice Wong proves up to the task in this fascinating audiobook."—Locus Magazine
"Audie Award Winner Eunice Wong is back with another compelling Nayler narration...an impressive feat."—Booklist
All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.
As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President's personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation's palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation's security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.
Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches listeners into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      It takes just the right narrator to weave a story of the world ending. Eunice Wong proves up to the task in this fascinating audiobook. In Naylor's gripping cybernetic thriller, governments across Europe start to crumble when their AI leaders begin to fail. Wong skillfully brings to life a handful of characters who get caught up in the turmoil of a deteriorating Europe. She radiates the characters' confusion as they struggle to reunite with their loved ones against a dangerous backdrop. Wong also animates the vile human political powers who are in large part responsible for this chaos. This production is timely, with technology propping up authoritarian governments. That relevance seeps through, thanks to Wong's versatile performance. D.E.M. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 13, 2025
      Nayler (The Mountain in the Sea) blends quantum theory and gulag history in his byzantine sophomore outing set in a near-future world divided between the Union, which is run by artificial intelligence, and the Federation, controlled by a Putin-like dictator who evades death by repeatedly downloading his consciousness into new bodies. Lilia, a brilliant programmer living in exile in London with her boyfriend, Palmer, decides to return home to an unnamed city in the Federation to visit her dying father. Her arrest as soon as she steps off the plane triggers a race between rival underground organizations to recover her research project, a pair of “dioramas” left in Palmer’s safe keeping. These contraptions use “induced entanglement between neural networks” to enable users to get inside each other’s minds—a technology with world-ending or -saving potential, depending in whose hands it lands. Nayler crams in a boatload of sci-fi concepts as well as plentiful references to Soviet Russia. The scene-setting is on point (“The city stretched off into the distance, composed of unlike fragments: an onion dome, the dray skeleton of an office tower... a scabrous line of apartment blocks”), but the pile-up of narrators (there are at least a half-dozen) and the many narrative switchbacks can be difficult to track. Still, Nayler’s writerly bravado impresses.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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