{"title":"Andrew Crumey","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"sputnik-caledonia-book-andrew-crumey-9780330447027","title":"Sputnik Caledonia","description":"A bold and exuberant tale of childhood, space travel and telepathy","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49514165797137,"sku":"GOR001390258","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348647612689,"sku":"CIN0330447025A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50925168460049,"sku":"GOR001331969","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51330553610513,"sku":"CIN0330447025VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52495020523793,"sku":"GOR003805618","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330447025.jpg?v=1751436519"},{"product_id":"secret-knowledge-book-andrew-crumey-9781909232457","title":"Secret Knowledge","description":"A lost musical masterpiece is at the heart of this gripping intellectual mystery by award-winning writer Andrew Crumey. In 1913 composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must finally face the real meaning of The Secret Knowledge. it s a clever book, and funny, and thought-provoking; it mixes a whodunnit with the intellectual japes of Umberto Eco, and (not surprisingly for Crumey, who s a highly trained physicist) a bunch of quantum references. It s the sort of book that has you constantly flipping back through the chapters to check connections and coincidences; that makes you nod furiously once you figure something out. And, by the end, you want to start over again as fast as possible to see if you ve properly understood it Bookmunch","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49519172092177,"sku":"GOR005193042","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49598043652369,"sku":"GOR006915582","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1909232459.jpg?v=1751446669"},{"product_id":"music-in-a-foreign-language-book-andrew-crumey-9781873982112","title":"Music, in a Foreign Language","description":"Two people meet on a train: the young man is imagining a novel, and imagining the life of the young woman. A waiter rushes out to find a girl he fancied who hasn't paid her bill, only to find a diary in which their fictitious flirtation is anatomised. But the story actually begins with a man taking a leak after making love to his wife. He has the inklings of a novel, but thoughts will keep intruding, with all their seductive possibilities. The man on the train is living in an England that has decided, with characteristic diffidence and lack of fuss, that it no longer wants to live under a totalitarian regime which has lasted for 40 years. I say totalitarian, but think more of Brazil, a world of terribly genial tyranny, where officialdom tries so hard to be accommodating. And Duncan has another story, one prompted by the memory of his father's car crashing down a slope. As with all good postmodernist novels, the endless digressions are more soothing than jarring. Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality. The Sunday Times A writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble. Like much of the most interesting British fiction around at the moment, Music, in a Foreign Language is being published in paperback by a small independent publishing house, giving hope that a tentative but long overdue counter-attack is being mounted on the indelible conservatism of the modern English novel.With this novel he has begun his own small stand against cultural mediocrity, and to set himself up, like his hero, as ' a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.' Jonathan Coe in The Guardian","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49550361592081,"sku":"GOR004036383","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50293379727633,"sku":"NGR9781873982112","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51299892789521,"sku":"GOR010392770","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1873982119.jpg?v=1751347136"},{"product_id":"pfitz-book-andrew-crumey-9781873982815","title":"Pfitz","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49555316769041,"sku":"GOR002285454","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49612384633105,"sku":"GOR011515103","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50487458988305,"sku":"GOR002259980","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/187398281X.jpg?v=1750803254"},{"product_id":"mr-mee-pb-book-andrew-crumey-9780330376815","title":"Mr Mee (Pb)","description":"Elderly Scottish bookworm Mr Mee searches the Internet for the legendary Rosier's Encyclopaedia which supposedly outlines an 18th-century quantum theory. Instead he enters a strange new world of cyber-hoaxers and online pornography. Meanwhile university lecturer Dr Petrie, an expert on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, recounts his infatuation with one of his own students. And in the third strand of this unique comedy of ideas, Rousseau's Laurel-and-Hardy-like neighbours Ferrand and Minard hold the key to Rosier's Encyclopaedia, Rousseau's madness, and Mr Mee himself.   Combining history and fantasy, philosophy and farce, Crumey's novel is an intellectual page-turner that keeps the reader laughing and guessing to the end.   'This book is fabulous stuff: erudite but not patronising, elegantly and simply written, jumping ambitiously across centuries but with a good dash of down-to-earth lust for entertainment. More than once, Crumey make his reader pause, rest the book in his lap, and acknowledg that life really is quite extraordinary. He deserves to be better known'  The Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49556566933777,"sku":"GOR001259863","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49613357285649,"sku":"GOR000899165","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49643754619153,"sku":"GOR003102390","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330376810.jpg?v=1751038581"},{"product_id":"mobius-dick-book-andrew-crumey-9789753428187","title":"Mobius Dick","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49586845024529,"sku":"GOR012777701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9753428189.jpg?v=1751385360"},{"product_id":"d-alambert-s-principle-book-andrew-crumey-9781873982327","title":"D'Alambert's Principle","description":"A wonderfully diverting and stimulating entertainment. Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and succeeds in being both fey and sharp, detached and compassionate. At a time when fiction gives all to the tired virtual realities of sex and violence, internets, Agas and middle-class Angst, it is a brilliant reminder of the power of the imagination to surprise, delight and open windows. David Coward in The Times Literary Supplement Crumey does produce excellent post-modernist novels, each as concentric and cunning as the others. This is a triptych starting with D'Alembert penning his imagined memoirs. The literary equivalent of an Escher, the story has no identifiable end or beginning. Clever, entertaining, engaging","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49590022668561,"sku":"GOR001677759","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49596027633937,"sku":"GOR005887082","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1873982321.jpg?v=1751347137"},{"product_id":"mobius-dick-book-andrew-crumey-9780330419918","title":"Mobius Dick","description":"A distinctive, witty and hugely inventive novel of ideas by Andrew Crumey. His previous novels have been widely praised and have won several prizes.   In MOBIUS DICK, physicist John Ringer, receives a mysterious text message that triggers an investigation into the development of new mobile phone technology in a research facility outside a remote Scottish village. Already the world is becoming a very different place: amnesia, telepathy, false memory and inexplicable coincidences all seem to be occurring more frequently with humorous, brain teasing results. Could quantum experiments have caused the collapse of our universe’s space-time continuum? Could the multi layered text we are reading come from another world altogether?   Praise for MR. MEE   \"brilliantly funny celebration of misunderstanding\" Michael Holroyd, Sunday Times   \"Fans of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn will relish this novel's puzzles and paradoxes\" Hilary Mantel   \"In short - it's fabulous.\" Jonathan Coe   \"Andrew Crumey is one of the most original novelists around.\" Miranda Seymour, New Statesman \"Books Of The Year\"   \"a perfectly manipulated voice. . . deadpan humour . . . all the tangled threads resolve into a beautifully executed pattern which is oddly moving.\" Roy Foster, Financial Times \"Books Of The Year\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49608738963729,"sku":"GOR003824799","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49642422731025,"sku":"GOR006002132","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330419919.jpg?v=1751425753"},{"product_id":"mr-mee-book-andrew-crumey-9781909232945","title":"Mr Mee","description":"'The playful preoccupation with alternative realities that dominated Scots author Crumey s previous fiction (including Pfitz and D Alembert s Principle) also informs this richly amusing novel about the search for an 18th-century encyclopedia that supposedly disproves the existence of the universe. Crumey s wonderfully obsessive characters include the crotchety title figure (an elderly book collector), the lissome life-scientist who acquaints him with the world outside books, a perceptive college teacher of French literature, and a pair of bachelor copyists (and autodidacts who are dead ringers for Flaubert s ineffably pompous Bouvard and Pecuchet). Rattling back and forth between two centuries, this agreeably serpentine tale speaks volumes about the folly of scholarly preoccupation and the unreliability of received wisdom, while never neglecting to entertain the bedazzled reader. Borges and Calvino would have approved.' Starred Review in Kirkus 'Crumey tells  his] tale with elegance and humor, and in rich detail. His immense talent reveals itself most potently in his ability to find remarkable connections in otherwise disparate intellectual concepts conceived over the course of several centuries, and then to turn those connections into a coherent and lively story. . . The many surprises and twists  in this book] provide a rare and spectacular reading experience . . . Mr. Mee is a challenging book, but it's one to savour.' Andrew C. Ervin in The Washington Post Book World","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49623210426641,"sku":"GOR008397442","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1909232947.jpg?v=1751061199"},{"product_id":"beethoven-s-assassins-book-andrew-crumey-9781912868230","title":"Beethoven's Assassins","description":"'The overall effect is like a brilliantly well-informed 200-year history of philosophy, science, music and mysticism, touched with an edge of Da Vinci Code hocus pocus, in the sense of an alternative \"sub rosa\" world history never quite revealed. To say so, though, is to miss the sheer fun and narrative energy of Crumey's writing, the skill and insight with which he conjures up each of his narrators from the repellent to the poignant, and the huge ingenuity with which he interweaves their stories, including that of Adam Crouch, a failed writer and memorably seedy 21st century buffoon, who enters the story by accident, and becomes its final boozed-up witness to timeless tragedy.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e There's something profoundly post-modern about the dense cultural references, and the complex patchwork of fact and fiction, that make up Crumey's narrative; and in that sense it continues in a vein he has been mining for the last 25 years and more. The intensity with which the story questions the very nature of time, though - and follows its central voice, Robert Coyle, through the strange reality-shifting nightmare of the pandemic - seems entirely of this moment; as if Crumey were leading us into a terminal vortex of history and thought, music and culture, parallel universes and competing realities, where all things sparkle and implode with extraordinary vividness, on the edge of oblivion.'\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49658200391953,"sku":"GOR013694959","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745167024401,"sku":"NGR9781912868230","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49793663959313,"sku":"GOR013318585","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50221876314385,"sku":"GOR013280115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054395982097,"sku":"NIN9781912868230","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1912868237.jpg?v=1751347332"},{"product_id":"the-great-chain-of-unbeing-book-andrew-crumey-9781910213773","title":"G The Great Chain of Unbeing","description":"Andrew Crumey's novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey's acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737990078737,"sku":"NGR9781910213773","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51333267882257,"sku":"GOR009121917","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1910213772.jpg?v=1751429967"},{"product_id":"mr-mee-book-andrew-crumey-9780312268039","title":"Mr. Mee","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49938529157393,"sku":"CIN0312268033G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53521114333457,"sku":"CIN0312268033A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312268033.jpg?v=1750812978"},{"product_id":"sputnik-caledonia-book-andrew-crumey-9780330448413","title":"Sputnik Caledonia","description":"Robbie Coyle dreams of going to space. In 1970s Scotland this ambition marks him out almost as much as his eccentric family does – in particular, his avidly socialist father. Indoctrinated in the ways of the Left, Robbie can’t entertain the idea of going into orbit with the capitalist Americans. So he gets a `teach yourself Russian’ book from the library and settles down with Einstein’s Meaning of Relativity by his side.   Later, however, his fantasies take on a darker shade. In an imagined communist Scotland, post-World War II, the young recruit Robert finds himself at the Installation, a closed, bleak town run under surveillance and dedicated to scientific research. Astronomers have discovered a black hole and the Party will stop at nothing to attain it. The Red Star, as it comes to be known, heralds both the awakening and the extinguishing of Robert’s adulthood: the discovery of cruelty and of love; and the realization that the most passionate of dreams may be merely a chimera.   Written with Andrew Crumey’s characteristic brio, Sputnik Caledonia is rich with the tenderness and frustrations of family life, comic and sinister by turns, and above all, audaciously imaginative – an exploration of space, of society, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49968447324433,"sku":"GOR001448138","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0330448412.jpg?v=1751196588"},{"product_id":"mobius-dick-book-andrew-crumey-9781909232938","title":"Mobius Dick","description":"'In some ways this is an edgily modern book, with Dick's namesake, Philip K Dick, among its guiding spirits. Admirers of Flann O'Brien's fictions will be struck by the beguiling ways in which Crumey uses unreliable narrators and worlds within worlds. In another sense the novel reaches back to a Renaissance aesthetic, in which art and scholarship, if not quite the same thing, are mutually adoring twins or lovers in a fable. Refreshingly, this is a novel in which science is a central character rather than a metaphor for something else. That said, it isn't a boffin-fest but a glitteringly original piece of storytelling, unapologetically intelligent, driven by tightly focused narrative skill. It is also acerbically funny, peppered with digs, while an Orwellian irony makes clear that the questions implied are not about some imagined culture, but concern the one in which we wake up every day. There is a winning sense of spaciousness in the writing, a feeling that the words are pouring out spontaneously. This quality is all the more impressive because the ideas are complex: indeed, those of us who are a bit rusty on Heisenberg's interpretation of wave functions may sense we're missing out. And even readers who marvel at Crumey's expansive, frisky prose may feel the allusion to cultural titans becomes a little relentless: Melville, Thomas Mann, Foucault, Nietzsche and Lacan are all name- checked in the first few pages. (Writing about writers is best avoided, comments Dick's therapist. This isn't advice Crumey would tolerate.) But while Mobius Dick is a work of sophisticated erudition, its playfulness and artistry make it a page-turner, too. It is perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach.' Joseph O'Connor in The Guardian 'Ingenious' is far too pallid a term of praise for this cunningly contrived entertainment, which may sound ponderous in outline but is actually a breeze, by turns slyly comic and oddly melancholy. For most readers, the soundness of its science will be of small consequence; as fiction it is solid plutonium, and unflaggingly enjoyable.' Kevin Jackson in The Sunday Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50022996443409,"sku":"CIN1909232939G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50883935830289,"sku":"GOR006014360","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1909232939.jpg?v=1751218754"},{"product_id":"pfitz-book-andrew-crumey-9781909232808","title":"Pfitz","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eCrumey has written a fantastic novel about a fantasy. . . . Real and unreal merge, interact, and form a tale that is part quirky amusement and part sly satire. --\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAn eighteenth-century prince, seeking his own immortality, devotes his entire wealth and the energy of his subjects to the creation of Rreinnstadt, a fantastic city that exists only on paper and in the minds of its creators. Among Rreinnstadt's fictional inhabitants is Pfitz, a count's loyal servant who mysteriously disappears on night from a tavern. Enamored of Pfitz's real-life biographer Estrella, one of the city's cartographers sets out on a quest to find Pfitz, hoping he will be rewarded by Estrella's love. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAndrew Crumey's exploration of the rich territory between reality and imagination reveals a genuine affection for the character and the terrain of the human heart.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50038685499665,"sku":"GOR005750725","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1909232807.jpg?v=1750964042"},{"product_id":"music-in-a-foreign-language-book-andrew-crumey-9780312146887","title":"Music, in a Foreign Language","description":"Two people meet on a train: the young man is imagining a novel, and imagining the life of the young woman. A waiter rushes out to find a girl he fancied who hasn't paid her bill, only to find a diary in which their fictitious flirtation is anatomised. But the story actually begins with a man taking a leak after making love to his wife. He has the inklings of a novel, but thoughts will keep intruding, with all their seductive possibilities. The man on the train is living in an England that has decided, with characteristic diffidence and lack of fuss, that it no longer wants to live under a totalitarian regime which has lasted for 40 years. I say totalitarian, but think more of Brazil, a world of terribly genial tyranny, where officialdom tries so hard to be accommodating. And Duncan has another story, one prompted by the memory of his father's car crashing down a slope. As with all good postmodernist novels, the endless digressions are more soothing than jarring. Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality. The Sunday Times A writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble. Like much of the most interesting British fiction around at the moment, Music, in a Foreign Language is being published in paperback by a small independent publishing house, giving hope that a tentative but long overdue counter-attack is being mounted on the indelible conservatism of the modern English novel.With this novel he has begun his own small stand against cultural mediocrity, and to set himself up, like his hero, as ' a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.' Jonathan Coe in The Guardian","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347328307473,"sku":"CIN0312146884G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312146884.jpg?v=1751228189"},{"product_id":"d-alembert-s-principle-book-andrew-crumey-9780312195687","title":"D'Alembert's Principle","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348865945873,"sku":"CIN0312195680G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312195680.jpg?v=1750695474"},{"product_id":"mr-mee-book-andrew-crumey-9780312282356","title":"Mr. Mee","description":"'The playful preoccupation with alternative realities that dominated Scots author Crumey s previous fiction (including Pfitz and D Alembert s Principle) also informs this richly amusing novel about the search for an 18th-century encyclopedia that supposedly disproves the existence of the universe. Crumey s wonderfully obsessive characters include the crotchety title figure (an elderly book collector), the lissome life-scientist who acquaints him with the world outside books, a perceptive college teacher of French literature, and a pair of bachelor copyists (and autodidacts who are dead ringers for Flaubert s ineffably pompous Bouvard and Pecuchet). Rattling back and forth between two centuries, this agreeably serpentine tale speaks volumes about the folly of scholarly preoccupation and the unreliability of received wisdom, while never neglecting to entertain the bedazzled reader. Borges and Calvino would have approved.' Starred Review in Kirkus 'Crumey tells  his] tale with elegance and humor, and in rich detail. His immense talent reveals itself most potently in his ability to find remarkable connections in otherwise disparate intellectual concepts conceived over the course of several centuries, and then to turn those connections into a coherent and lively story. . . The many surprises and twists  in this book] provide a rare and spectacular reading experience . . . Mr. Mee is a challenging book, but it's one to savour.' Andrew C. Ervin in The Washington Post Book World","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50350565523729,"sku":"CIN0312282354G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000844288273,"sku":"NIN9780312282356","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312282354.jpg?v=1751390916"},{"product_id":"pfitz-book-andrew-crumey-9780312195502","title":"Pfitz","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Crumey has written a fantastic novel about a fantasy. . . . Real and unreal merge, interact, and form a tale that is part quirky amusement and part sly satire.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e An eighteenth-century prince, seeking his own immortality, devotes his entire wealth and the energy of his subjects to the creation of Rreinnstadt, a fantastic city that exists only on paper and in the minds of its creators. Among Rreinnstadt's fictional inhabitants is Pfitz, a count's loyal servant who mysteriously disappears on night from a tavern. 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