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Maxwell's Demon

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Maxwell's Demon

By: Steven Hall
Narrated by: Piers Hampton
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Summary

Signed first edition
This autumn, life is catching up with Thomas Quinn.

Five years ago, his mentor Andrew Black wrote a single, million-selling mystery novel and then disappeared. Now could it be that Quinn is being stalked by the hero of Black’s book? His girlfriend Imogen usually has the answers but she’s working on the other side of the world and talking to her on webcam just isn’t the same.

Quinn finds himself in a world that might well be coming apart at the seams. If he can find Black, he might start finding answers.

Maxwell’s Demon forges an entirely new blend of mystery – somewhere between detective fiction, ghost story and philosophical quest. With the same white-knuckle thrills as Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, this new book is also a freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a world that, with each passing season, seems to become more chaotic and untidy.

 Friendship Genre Fiction Fiction Mystery Heartfelt Paranormal

Critic Reviews

"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"
"Ingeniously plotted and compulsively well-paced, a blend of detective story and science fiction with an epistemology course thrown in"
"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"
"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"
"A smart, teasing and (above all) lovable mystery tale . . . Superb"
"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" (Stuart Kelly)
"An entropic and sprawling mystery . . . Mind-twisting . . . Introspective and philosophical, the novel explores the dangers that occur when fatalistic urges take over"
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