The Rhyl Poster

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A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, in the thrilling new novel from twice Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

'A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry' Chloe Aridjis

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star legal theorist in Europe’s highest court. But after he meets the enigmatic Pirotti, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced to pills his new handler calls petits bleus, Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti's colleagues - or just passing out - as he surrenders to sublime visions in which lurk dark traces of a violent incident back in Iraq.

Entrusted with the drafting of an epochal, landmark ruling, Stanton instead begins work on something else: a vast, sprawling 'confession' made up of patterns, markings and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world that he and those around him have so carefully constructed. To destroy it, certainly, but maybe, from that very act of ruination, to usher in a bright new beginning.

The Rhyl Poster crafts a hallucinatory landscape in which guilt – our own, and our whole era’s – is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

'The most visionary of contemporary writers' Neel Mukherjee

'Unfolds with the velocity of a thriller... Truly new, truly gut-flipping, truly exhilarating and vertiginous' Tim MacGabhann

'The high priest of the technological sublime' Ben Eastham

A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry. A hymn to all the unacknowledged legislators of the world, which hums with the living ghosts of systems, signals and geometry.
Chloe Aridjis

The high priest of the technological sublime. McCarthy's latest sifts through the information overload of our age, seeking out patterns, correspondences, transcendence, truth. Language here is an instrument to conjure awe, and the looping, hypnotic prose of The Rhyl Poster offers near-mystical glimpses of the systems underpinning late capitalism even as the plot rattles along like a spy thriller.
Ben Eastham

About Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His third novel, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the Europese Literatuurprijs and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.

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