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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Satin Island

A novel for our times, from 'a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting new territories' (Observer)

Smart, shimmering and thought-provoking…McCarthy isn’t a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he’s a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful — in other words, compulsively readable.

Should you read the new Tom McCarthy book? (A: Yes. Always yes.)

Dazzling and elusive… a magisterial ethnographic portrait of our overstimulated, interconnected, simulacra-addicted times.

The kind of strange and ambitious fiction that you feared might have died with J. G. Ballard. ...Provokes and beguiles and, at the point of revelation, it withholds. On finishing it you will have the powerful urge to throw it across the room, then the powerful urge to pick it up to read again. And that’s what’s so brilliant.

Confusing, clever and about to be massive.

Nails the modern condition of information overload

Satin Island is an undeniably dazzling piece of writing, a perfect tight circle of interlocking motifs, mini-treatises and allusions.

McCarthy’s crisp, clean prose is stimulating, his concepts original and his visual imagery powerful.

[An] entertaining slice of experimental fiction.

Booker-nominated author Tom McCarthy’s latest offering is lean, smart and infuriating.

McCarthy's writing is cool and elegant, descriptive, yet informal and conversational.

An intellectually challenging and highly engaging work of art.

It is dead-clever, very funny, insanely ambitious, sometimes insane, essentially brilliant and commendably engaged with the way we’re living our lives right now.

Reading a McCarthy novel is like being in a McCarthy novel: everything is part of a fizzing network, the scope of which can never be fully apprehended.

Without beginning, middle, end – and especially lacking centre! – the novel comes to a halt, leaving the reader in a gorgeous daze of symbol and cypher, whose meaning is so clear, and yet tantalizingly opaque.

Satin Island is clever, vogue, slick and sleek.

Packed with intriguing and intellectual ideas… refreshingly thought-provoking.

The bleeding edge of science fiction is Satin Island.

In Satin Island the narrator, U, takes us on a journey through the modern world of ideas, theories and references. It’s a wonderfully intense experience – as soon as I’d finished I wanted to read it again.

Convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists.

A darkly funny and disturbing meditation on the intricacies and insubstantiality of our technology-ridden times. McCarthy is one of the most daring, most ambitious and most subtle of what at my age I can all the younger generation of writers.

The novel often reads like a dramatic monologue, a very modern stream of consciousness, akin to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake… McCarthy’s novel is innovative, well crafted and challenging… This novel is breaking new ground, a breath of fresh air, at times a tour de force.

McCarthy has put his finger on something, and he’s nailed it very precisely. It’s how we live now. All the information we process every day. What it’s doing to us.

Tom McCarthy is the author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature and four internationally celebrated novels: Remainder, Men in Space, C, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize, and Satin Island, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 McCarthy was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. His creation, in 1999, of the International Necronautical Society has led to installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain and the ICA in London to The Drawing Center in New York.

U. is a 'corporate anthropologist' who, while working on a giant, epoch-defining project no one really understands, is also tasked with writing the Great Report on our society. But instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions. 
 
Is there a secret logic holding all these images together? Once cracked, will it unlock the master-meaning of our era? Might it have something to do with the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.

Transmission and the Individual Remix

An arresting and inspiring invitation to rethink literature itself, from the author of the Booker-shortlisted C

It’s a bold and thought-provoking mission that replaces the originality of the muse with the remixing of an ever-present background signal

Listen... 
 
A set of signals has been pulsing, repeating, modulating in the airspace of literature... 
 
This essay is an invitation to listen to those signals, as they travel through and shape the work of Aeschylus and Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Burroughs, Joyce and others. To retune our idea of what a writer does, of what the very act of writing 'is'. To rethink literature itself along the lines of transmission and reception, signal and noise... 
 
Listen: two times. I repeat... 
 
Message ends.

The author of 'one of the great English novels of the past ten years' moves to the next level, with a novel of thrilling action, imagination and ambition. 
 
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

C inserts itself, slyly yet confidently, into the history of modernism. This is a genuinely exciting and spookily beautiful book, a new kind of joy

McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories

An intelligent, ambitious book... A beautiful, accessible novel with a thrilling tale. This is one of the most brilliant books to have hit the shelves this year and McCarthy deserves high praise for an electric piece of writing which should be enjoyed as well as discussed

C is formidably well assembled, and it is admirable for an unashamed literary ambition

A narrative of energy, invention and intelligence begins to take shape: one that is at once dazzling and profoundly resonant...Tom McCarthy has written a novel for our times: refreshingly different, intellectually acute and strikingly enjoyable. Whether the Man Booker judges concur remains to be seen, but is seems highly unlikely that anyone will publish a better novel this year

The strength of the novel is in the richness of McCarthy's intelligent, detailed research, while Serge is the cipher that he's used to convey it

McCarthy has fashioned a poised, polished and occasionally perplexing novel that frames the dawn of the communications onslaught now engulfing us...Builds into a breathless tour de force...combining the impetus, mystery and gale-force pandemonium of the age- not to mention McCarthy's delirious prose - into a swirling finale that is at once confounding and eminently satisfying

...C is a very good book indeed... McCarthy is one of the most intelligent and talented novelists of our generation.

Its questioning hypnotic textures pay dividends

Whatever happens to this novel or to this writer, a chain of events has been set in motion. Nothing and no one is going to stop it going on and on.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity

C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who - as his name suggests - surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. 
 
Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flight-paths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt. 
 
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Tom McCarthy

In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical... Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers, is light years ahead of anyone writing anywhere currently.

A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth.

One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment... The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida and a sci-fi romp all at the same time... There is something uplifting about McCarthy's work. He makes you think, and he makes you think things you hadn't thought before.

Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written.

Difficulty is...part of the pleasure of reading McCarthy... The Making of Incarnation is a novel of motion rather than emotion; imagine an even chillier JG Ballard... a rich and fascinating exercise in observation

Daily Telegraph - Praise for 'Satin Island'

Should you read the new Tom McCarthy book? (A: Yes. Always yes.)

Huffington Post - Praise for 'Satin Island'

John Banville, the Observer - Praise for 'Satin Island'

Here...McCarthy writes at the height of his powers, interweaving the new future with the recent past... The Making of Incarnation McCarthy adds to his reputation as one of our most knowledgeable and perceptive novelists.

The most ambition and exciting novel yet from the Booker shortlisted author of C and Satin Island. 
 
Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it? 
 
 Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data but did she also discover a 'perfect' movement that would 'change everything'? 
 
 An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones in his search for it. And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy... 
 
'Dazzling... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical' Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others 
 
'Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written' GQ 
 
'A rich and fascinating exercise in observation' Independent

Tom McCarthy

Praise for The Making of Incarnation

In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical... Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers ...

A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth.

One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment... The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida an ...

In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical... Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers ...

A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth.

One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment... The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida an ...

In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical... Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers ...

A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth.

One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment... The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida an ...

Books by Tom McCarthy

Articles featuring Tom McCarthy

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

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