The Great When cover art

The Great When

Long London, Book 1

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Great When

By: Alan Moore
Narrated by: Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 Bloomsbury presents The Great When by Alan Moore, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

Nominated for Best Performance: Narrator at The Speakies (The British Audio Awards).

This audiobook features an exclusive essay, The True History of What Didn’t Happen, written and read by Alan Moore.

‘I was in the wrong London. It was horrible. I’d fallen in by accident, and it was all alive and trying to eat me.’

The year 1949, the city London.

Hapless second-hand bookseller Dennis stumbles through a city still shaking off the war. While out procuring inventory, Dennis’s life changes forever when he chances upon a novel that shouldn’t exist; an entirely fictional book from inside another novel.

The book hails from The Great When, a magical shadow-London, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts like Crime, Poetry and Riot are incarnated as mystical beings that stalk the streets. This discovery brings terrible danger, as the book’s presence leaves the doorway open between the two Londons, and The Great When must remain a secret.

Soon Dennis finds himself in the city’s occult underbelly, negotiating sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some imaginary, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. If Dennis cannot return the book and close the gate, he risks dire repercussions...

Neither London will ever be the same again.

History collides with magic in The Great When. Dark, ridiculous, propulsive, Sunday Times bestseller Alan Moore opens the gates to capital metafictional chaos in the genre-busting first instalment of the Long London series.

'It does what fantasy does best which is show us something beyond our experience… this shows us something absolutely new' Susanna Clarke

'A breathless time-travelling classic. Savage, humane, comic, terrifying' Iain Sinclair

'Brilliant and so powerfully imaginative’ Adam Curtis

'A weird book and a complete joy' Mariana Enríquez

‘A masterful step from one of our very best, uncompromising storytellers; Moore peels back the layers of London and reveals not only the history we know, but the histories that could have been, and, underneath it all, both the dark and beautiful truths about who we are as a nation.’ Heather Parry©2024 Alan Moore (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Crime Dark Fantasy Fantasy Genre Fiction Historical Magical Realism Murder England Magic Mind-bending Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Voice of the Fire cover art
OverLondon cover art
EC Comics Presents...The Vault of Horror! cover art
The Colour of Magic cover art
Austin Osman Spare (Revised & Expanded Edition) cover art
The Stranger Times cover art
Tress of the Emerald Sea: A Cosmere Novel (Dramatized Adaptation) cover art
The Invisible Library cover art
The 13th Witch cover art
Dogs of War cover art
Written in Dead Wax cover art
The End Of Mr. Y cover art
Children of Time cover art
Lemuria cover art
Fiends in High Places cover art
Unacknowledged cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Good tight plotting which from Moore's novels isn't always a given. The characters feel alive.

Beautiful language as usual from Moore.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved the insanely densely packed descriptions, more vivid than a 15 year old’s hair (I am still scarred by that revelation). Thought Kobna, whose work I much admired on Rivers and Morden, was the perfect foil. Only disappointments were the slightly abrupt and downbeat ending, and the fact that I will now have to wait what will feel like ages for the next instalment.

Tour de force

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
At first this was a hard uphill slog to get in to. I didn't think I'd make it and was going to disappointedly DNF it but then I realised I kept mulling it over in between listening and found I was invested in the characters. I kept coming back to it and I'm really glad I did. The latter part of the book was most definitely easier to follow and it seemed the narrator finally found his rhythm (although for some inexplicable reason the mention of the shop door sign being 'open' or 'closed' got stuck in his throat...I couldn't go back to check I'd not had a glitch in my hearing after the 3rd time of hearing it so would be interested if anyone else experienced that). If you liked Gormenghast, Neverwhere and The Rivers of London and like alternate realities, then this is definitely the book for you.

Words. Lots of them.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A really rich use of language that takes us into the hidden true face of London. We are also taken on this journey by a wonderful voice artist as narrator.

Beautifully written, curiously created

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
if you appreciate Alan Moore, you'll love this book. Brilliantly read by KHS too!

one of the great authors

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews