The Lost Time Accidents - Hardcover

John Wray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1782118926 ISBN 13: 9781782118923

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2016

Synopsis

Every moment that passes is a
Lost Time Accident.
Close your eyes, Children,
when you want
to stop Time . . .

Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar 'Waldy' Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back.

In his ambitious and fiercely inventive new novel, John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein's radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.

The Lost Time Accidents is a bold and epic saga set against the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

About this title

Review:

"For a while now, John Wray has been writing as if let in on the secret history of the world, paying attention to moments we all know, but at the point where we've stopped looking. So of course only he would find the crazy quilt universe of sci-fi, war, mystery, doomed love and eerie foresight that was always lurking deep in the grand old novel in letters. This is literature as high-wire act without the net; epic in scale, even bigger in heart" (Marlon James)

"John Wray gets his Calvino on, his Mitchell on, his Murakami on, and even his Joyce on in this spectacular rattlebag of a novel. The Lost Time Accidents circulates through time and geography - from New York to Central Europe - and eventually ebbs eloquently back to the essential questions of who we are and why we're here. Who says the novel is dead? Just smash the clocks and open this novel" (Colum McCann)

"With this darkly playful chronicle of three generations of crackpots and criminals, losers and visionaries, John Wray has written a book of eerie magic: Waldy Tolliver's love letter to the mysterious Mrs. Haven is a secret love letter to fiction itself. A mischievous epic, luminous and strange" (Kiran Desai)

"John Wray is the next wave of American fiction" (Jonathan Lethem)

"America's most original young writer" (Gary Shteyngart author of Absurdistan) --Marlon James

"John Wray is a daring young writer" (James Wood New Yorker) --New Yorker

"One of our most astonishing and relevant young writers" (Esquire) --Esquire

Book Description:

This year's Big American Novel is a high-concept epic that races through one family's experience of the twentieth century

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1782118926
• ISBN 13: 9781782118923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512