macdonald harris

Airships, mysticism, erotic love and a Europe that is picking itself up after WW1, form the backdrop to this breathtaking novel. The League of Nations is a giant airship constructed by the same German factory that made the Zeppelin, and has been acquired by Moira, the mystic and clairvoyant leader of a semi-religious cult. The captain is Georg von Plautus, a Prussian WW1 Zeppelin commander who harbours a terrible secret from a bombing raid over London in 1916. Moira and her followers have embarked on an extraordinary voyage in this airship to a place that she calls Giaconda. This  novel is  MacDonald Harris' only hitherto unpublished work.  It explores the lives of the characters on board, taking the reader through a heady mix of sexual entanglements, metaphysics, and Blavatsky and Swedenborg-influenced séances. Towards the end of the novel it is apparent that all of Moira’s devotees have something in common in their backgrounds.