RSSOn Saturday 25 February 2012, Tom McCarthy will be appearing at 192 Books, 192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street, New York City:
Tom McCarthy
MEN IN SPACE
(Vintage, 2012)
Saturday, February 25th, 7PM
The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy — acclaimed author of Remainder and C — Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the fall of Communism. It follows an oddball cast of characters — dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut — as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. The icon’s melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters’ ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.
“McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories.”- The Observer (London)
“I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward… one of the great English novels of the past ten years.”- Zadie Smith on Remainder in The New York Review of Books