Vurt

Vurt is a science fiction novel by the British writer Jeff Noon, published in 1993 and set in an altered Manchester.

Vurt is a drug that takes its users into a shared reality, and the vurt worlds are made of the dreams, stories and images people have put into them, which makes them both real and second-hand. Scribble and his sister took a trip together and he came back without her, and a thing that came back with him has been kept in a house ever since. His search for the Curious Yellow feather, which is banned and possibly mythical, takes him through the criminal economy of feathers and through a city where the police, the dealers and the vurt have interests of their own. Noon writes in a compressed slang of his own invention, and the book treats the drug as a place with geography and inhabitants rather than as a metaphor.

It was the author's first novel as well as the first book from its publisher, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.