Maxwell's demon - Steven Hall

'Deliciously diabolical' Chris Brookmyre
'Wickedly playful' M.R. Carey

Thomas Quinn is having the strangest autumn . . .
Nine years ago, his mentor Andrew Black wrote a million-copy-selling mystery novel - and then disappeared. Now could it be that Thomas is being stalked by the hero of Black's book? And that new answerphone message sounds a lot like his own father. His father who has been dead for years.

Thomas's wife Imogen usually has the answers but she's on the other side of the world. If he can just find Black, perhaps Thomas might start finding some answers . . .

With the same white-knuckle thrills as Hall's first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, Maxwell's Demon is a freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, the bond between parents and children, and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a chaotic and untidy world.

Steven Hall was born in 1975. His 'Stories for a Phone Book' featured in New Writing 13. The Raw Shark Texts is his first novel and won the Borders Original Voices Award and the Somerset Maugham
Award. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages and film rights have been optioned by Film Four. Steven was chosen by Granta Magazine in 2013 as one of the decade's Best Young British Novelists. He lives in Hull, England.

Thirteen years after The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall comes back with another dazzlingly smart postmodern treat. Maxwell's Demon is both steeped in high European theory - think Calvino and Eco - and enormously enjoyable
Observer

Ingeniously plotted and compulsively well-paced, a blend of detective story and science fiction with an epistemology course thrown in
Sunday Times

A postmodern mystery . . . Ingenious fun . . . Showily postmodern, full of odd typographical elements, altered realities and intertextual jokes . . . Maxwell's Demon is consistently fun and often impressive
Guardian, Book of the Day

An engaging, pacy mystery as well as an exploration of reality, entropy and the language of a modern creative landscape . . . The book is full of conceptual and typographic trickery and it's soaked in an appreciation of the written word
Independent, Books of the Month

A smart, teasing and (above all) lovable mystery tale . . . Superb
Sunday Telegraph

Dazzlingly clever, wickedly playful, devastatingly poignant
M.R. CAREY

Labyrinthine, mind-twisting and deliciously diabolical, yet also unexpectedly warm-hearted. Maxwell's Demon is fantastic
CHRIS BROOKMYRE

A cracking detective story that seems to be investigating its own existence
JEFF NOON

Moves at an exhilarating lick . . . The genius of the book is that despite it seeming like an elegant orrery, all these wheels within wheels are a carapace, a psychic armour against a grief (and it's not the grief you were expecting). Beneath this truly beautiful astrolabe is a beating human heart
Scotsman - Stuart Kelly

An entropic and sprawling mystery . . . Mind-twisting . . . Introspective and philosophical, the novel explores the dangers that occur when fatalistic urges take over
New Statesman

Anyone who enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts will be delighted
TOBY LITT

Written in the first person and paced like a thriller, there's an intimacy and immediacy that quickly grips, and even the long digressions on theory - a trademark of the form - are enjoyable to read
Spectator

With Maxwell's Demon, Steven Hall has created a kaleidoscopic, disconcerting God game in which reality itself is thrown into deep shape-shifting shade. Like David Mitchell, Mark Z. Danielewski and the Christopher Nolan of Inception, Hall has created his own unique world in which readers take a journey as mercurial and unexpected as life itself. Maxwell's Demon is a radiant and unique achievement
BRADFORD MORROW

It's Raymond Chandler meets Dan Brown meets Albert Einstein. Meets Christopher Nolan. Meets Jorge Luis Borges. It's a mind-expanding page-turning adventure-mystery that crackles with intelligence and intrigue; a book about books (sort of) that's been beautifully rendered in book form
FOYLES

A wonderfully imaginative, splendidly baroque novel that is a combination of the baffling, teasing and tantalising. Part fantasy, part mystery, it is altogether delightful and filled with surprises - in a word, exceptional. No, make that two words; the second is fantastic. A rare, sui generis treat
Booklist (starred review)

PRAISE FOR THE RAW SHARK TEXTS: Inventive, funny and extremely smart . . . I
nearly fell off my chair with admiration
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

A cult in the making
Time Out

A psychological thriller with shades of Memento
and The Matrix and the fiction of Mark Danielewski; page-turning, playful and
chilling by turns
Guardian

Clever, exciting, funny and moving
Sunday Times

Very entertaining. The bastard love-child
of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code
MARK HADDON

Genuinely isn't like anything you've ever read
before
Independent

No novel with a cat called Ian in it can fail to
win a place in my heart
Daily Telegraph