Satin Island
By Tom McCarthy
By Tom McCarthy
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Published on Feb 17, 2015 | 208 Pages
Published on Feb 17, 2015 | 208 Pages
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize
From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.
U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.
In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.
Author
Tom McCarthy
TOM MCCARTHY’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. His novel, C, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, and the European Literature Prize; his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. McCarthy is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.
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