The Coffin of Honey
Out May 12, 2026 with Coach House Books
Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.
At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician’s speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another’s orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about ‘the interdimensional will to the aesthetic’ – a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.
The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.
‘”[A]larming, wondrous speculative…a searing indictment of capitalist destruction wrapped in the pleasures of a first contact tale…The prose is elegant, philosophical, and introspective, though also pocked with reminders of human corruption.”
– Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword
“The Coffin of Honey is a book of Nabokovian complexity
– Dawn Macdonald, Strange Horizons
that invites re-reading immediately upon completion.”
Written in rhythmic prose and filled with a rhapsody of ideas, The Coffin of Honey is a palimpsestic text that pulsates with strangeness and beauty. This singular novel offers satire-laced musings on the absurdities of the capitalist world, and a meditation on transport and transformation, and on the collective construction of meaning in the face of the unknown. A remarkable work.”
– Christine Lai, author of Landscapes
‘”Morrison brings a delightful tenderness to the strange that makes the many locations of the narrative across the continents all feel warm, and rich, and densely populated.”
– Ben Berman Ghan, Ancillary Review of Books
“Comparative to science fiction, revolution also requires world-building, and like all good leftist thinkers, Morrison is not simply interested in diagnosis, but imagination.”
– Kenna Clifford, The British Columbia Review
Geoffrey D. Morrison 