Jerusalem was published by Knockabout (UK) and Liveright (US) in 2016. It is Alan Moore’s magnum opus in prose: approximately 615,000 words divided into three books, set almost entirely in the Boroughs — the working-class neighborhood of Northampton, England, where Moore was born and has lived his entire life.
The novel’s scope is total: it encompasses the Boroughs from the Bronze Age through the present, from the earthly to the celestial. The dead wander “Upstairs” — a timeless realm above the living world where the entire history of the neighborhood exists simultaneously. Angels (or entities that might be angels) oversee the architecture of time. A builder named Ern Vernall, driven mad by a glimpse of the fourth dimension, becomes the pivot around which the novel’s cosmology turns. His descendants — including a contemporary artist and a former psychiatric patient — navigate a world in which time, death, and meaning operate according to rules that conventional fiction cannot accommodate.
Moore has described the novel as an attempt to do for Northampton what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses — but where Joyce compressed a city into a single day, Moore expands a neighborhood across all of time. The prose styles shift radically between chapters: mock-Elizabethan, stream-of-consciousness, detective fiction, children’s adventure, a chapter written entirely in the invented language of the dead.
Collecting Jerusalem
First edition (Knockabout, London / Liveright, New York, 2016): Hardcover, 1,266 pages.
Market values:
- UK first edition (Knockabout), fine/fine: $50–$150
- US first edition (Liveright), fine/fine: $30–$75
- Signed copies: $100–$300