The Age of Wire and String

The most audacious literary debut in decades - witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing - Robert Coover Transfixing... an extraordinary debut... A treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature. Multiple readings are rewarding - Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement Frequently touching and funny... a cross between a scientific manual, Monty Python and a kind of Bible, with a surreal and opaque logic of its own - Christina Patterson, Observer Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful... all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home - Donald Antrim This novel has a place within the chaotic tradition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. [If] novels are to reflect the complexities of the modern world, they must take on some of its messy characteristics... Intelligent and good-humoured - Andrew Biswell, Daily Telegraph The Age of Wire and String evades classification, persisting in your mind because of its psychotically ardent prose... It uses words as they once were, as incantations, as spells to summon up the contorted beings of the imagination - Matthew De Abaitua, The Idler Fragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments - written in some of the most breathtaking prose I've encountered lately - Rick Moody "

BEN MARCUS is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York. CATRIN MORGAN studied illustration at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.