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A bold and exuberant tale of childhood, space travel and telepathyRobbie Coyle is an imaginative kid. He wants so badly to become Scotland's first cosmonaut that he tries to teach himself Russian and trains for space exploration in the cupboard under the sink. But the place to which his fantasies later take him is far from the safety of his suburban childhood. In a communist state, in a closed, bleak town, the mysterious Red Star heralds his discovery of cruelty and of love, and the possibility that the most passionate of dreams may only be a chimera . . . 'Sputnik Caledonia should leave you breathless with admiration. A quantum leap forward for the Scottish novel' Scotland on Sunday 'A brio of a book . . . One for the boys, big and little - and for those of us who wonder just what does go on inside a boy's head' Spectator 'Andrew Crumey has fused a thrilling personal narrative with quantum mechanics in a way that somehow looks easy . . . Never has astrophysics seemed so touching and funny' Daily Telegraph 'There are echoes here of Alasdair Gray's Lanark; echoes of Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! . . . A real haunting triumph' Observer
An eighteenth-century prince devotes his entire wealth and the energy of his subjects to the creation of Rreinnstadt, a fantastic city that exists only on paper and in the minds of its creators. Among Rreinnstadt's fictional inhabitants is Pfitz, a count's loyal servant who mysteriously disappears one night from a tavern. Andrew Crumey's exploration of the rich territory between reality and fantasy reveals a genuine affection for character and the terrain of the human heart.
In MOBIUS DICK, physicist John Ringer, receives a mysterious text message that triggers an investigation into the development of new mobile phone technology in a research facility outside a remote Scottish village. Already the world is becoming a very different place: amnesia, telepathy, false memory and inexplicable coincidences all seem to be occurring more frequently with humorous, brain teasing results. Could quantum experiments have caused the collapse of our universe’s space-time continuum? Could the multi layered text we are reading come from another world altogether? ‘Crumey is one of my three or four favourite modern writers - a wise, funny, alert and original novelist who has n...
A lost musical masterpiece is at the heart of this gripping intellectual mystery by award-winning writer Andrew Crumey. In 1913 composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must...
"First published in 2000 by Picador"--Title page verso.
Andrew Crumey’s novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insec...
"Two people meet on a train: the young man is imagining a novel, and imagining the life of the young woman. A waiter rushes out to find a girl he fancied who hasn't paid her bill, only to find a diary in which their fictitious flirtation is anatomised. But the story actually begins with a man taking a leak after making love to his wife. He has the inklings of a novel, but thoughts will keep intruding, with all their seductive possibilities. The man on the train is living in an England that has decided, with characteristic diffidence and lack of fuss, that it no longer wants to live under a totalitarian regime which has lasted for 40 years. I say totalitarian, but think more of Brazil, a worl...
The award-winning science writer “packs a lot of learning into a deceptively light and enjoyable read” exploring the contentious history of the black hole (New Scientist). For more than half a century, physicists and astronomers engaged in heated dispute over the possibility of black holes in the universe. The strange notion of a space-time abyss from which not even light escapes seemed to confound all logic. Now Marcia Bartusiak, author of Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony and The Day We Found the Universe, recounts the frustrating, exhilarating, and at times humorous battles over one of history’s most dazzling ideas. Bartusiak shows how the black hole helped revive Einstein’s greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity, after decades of languishing in obscurity. Not until astronomers discovered such surprising new phenomena as neutron stars and black holes did the once-sedate universe transform into an Einsteinian cosmos, filled with sources of titanic energy that can be understood only in the light of relativity. Black Hole explains how Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other leading thinkers completely changed the way we see the universe.
Mr. Mee, a reclusive British book collector, tries to track down a copy of a long-vanished Rosier's Encyclopedia, while Dr. Petrie, a professor of French literature, falls in love with one of his students, and 18th century copyists Ferrand and Minard arecharged with reproducing Rosier's original manuscript.
"Pfitz is a surprisingly warm and likeable book, a combination of intellectual high-wire act and good traditional storytelling with a population of lovers and madmen we do care about, despite their advertised fictionality. Certainly Crumey's narrative gymnastics have not affected his ability to create strong, fleshy characters, and none more fleshy, more fleshly, than Frau Luppen, Schenck's middle-aged landlady, a great blown rose of a woman who express her affection for her lodger by feeding him bowls of inedible stew." Andrew Miller in The New York Times "Rreinnstadt is a place which exists nowhere - the conception of a 18th century prince who devotes his time, and that of his subjects, to...