James Thornton

James Thornton is an environmental lawyer, writer, and founder of the legal organization ClientEarth. Sphinx is the catalogue’s shortened title for Sphinx: The Second Coming, his second novel, published by Barbican Press in 2014. The story brings academics to Egypt to study the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, then connects their discoveries with distant civilizations and an approaching environmental reckoning. Thornton has described travelling to Egypt while drafting the book and drawing on ancient history, science, and spiritual questions to shape its speculative setting. His earlier novel Immediate Harm used a legal thriller framework with science-fiction elements. Beyond fiction, Thornton has written about environmental law and spiritual practice, including Client Earth and A Field Guide to the Soul. Sphinx occupies the point where those interests meet: it moves from modern Cairo to a wider cosmic scale while keeping humanity’s treatment of the natural world at the center of its plot.