Description

Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction

‘A tremendous novel – droll, savvy, original. An invigorating blast of fiction’ William Boyd

‘A superbly entertaining brain-twister’ The Times

A hurricane sweeps off the Gulf of Mexico and in the back-country of Alabama, assembles a passenger jet out of old bean-cans and junkyard waste. An eccentric mathematician – last heard of investigating the physics of free will and ranting about the devil – vanishes in the French Pyrenees.

And the thuggish operatives of a multinational arms conglomerate are closing in on Alex Smart – a harmless Cambridge postgraduate who has set off with hope in his heart and a ring in his pocket to ask his American girlfriend to marry him.

At the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable – an organisation so secret that many of its operatives aren’t 100 per cent sure it exists — Red Queen takes an interest. What ensues is a chaotic chase across an imaginary America, haunted by madness, murder, mistaken identity, and a very large number of unhealthy but delicious snacks. The Coincidence Engine exists. And it has started to work.

The Coincidence Engine is consistently engaging – one of the most enjoyable, entertaining debut novels you’ll come across for ages.

Publisher Review

'A tremendous novel - droll, savvy, original. An invigorating blast of fiction' * William Boyd * 'A superbly entertaining brain-twister' * The Times * 'This is a novel of ideas [...] Sam Leith pulls it off with admirable imaginative stamina, helped along by sharply observed and entertaining writing' * Independent * 'Witty and inventive, like southing out of Hitchcock by way of Carl Hiassen, this tale of mayhem, murder and mistaken identity is a hugely entertaining, freewheeling riff on the paranoid, conspiracy driven American psyche' * Mail on Sunday *