It is 1867 and winter in Ryazan, a city on the banks of the Oka River in Central Russia. Konstantin is ten years old. His days are full of dreams of flight — to Moscow, even to the silent stars. But then, one day, he catches cold in the freezing woods near his home and his own world becomes silent. Left deaf by scarlet fever, his outlook is desperate. Only his fascination with a newly mechanised age and his astonishing visions of humanity's future seem to offer him any sort of hope. As vivid and evocative as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Konstantin, Tom Bullough's brilliant, inspirational novel, tells the extraordinary story, based on a real-life character, of the first man to reveal how travel into space might be possible. It is a story of man, nature, and the limitless power of the imagination. Tom Bullough was born in 1975 and is the author of two previous novels. He lives in Breconshire, in mid-Wales, with his wife and young son.