Description

The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Moebius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith’s inherent danger.

Publisher Review

'Memoir collides with invention in a brilliant interrogation of art, faith and relationships... Catherine Lacey's work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Moebius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else... The Moebius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention -- Sarah Moss * Guardian * [A] compulsively readable meditation on desire... The cathartic indictment of The Moebius Bookis what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous * Observer * Every book Lacey writes is uniquely strange, but all of them investigate the slipperiness of storytelling... [The Moebius Book] makes you think deeply about how we construct stories to make sense of our lives * The Times * A deliciously weird mix of theology, allegory and dark humour; The Moebius Book is every bit as brilliant and electrifying as everything Lacey has ever written -- Sara Baume A page-turner in both directions, The Moebius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy... I was absolutely spellbound -- Leslie Jamison A fiction-memoir hybrid... A literary highlight of the spring * Telegraph * Both sections are as good as you would expect from Lacey, but I found the memoir the most enthralling... I found its disturbing clarity about death, violence, faith, family, took me away from my own world for a while * The Common Reader * A brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls -- Meghan O'Rourke Catherine Lacey is one of my favourite contemporary novelists... Terrific at blending the cerebral and the playful... When I read her, I always feel there's something at stake, and that I'll come away not only intellectually stretched, but also emotionally satisfied -- Alex Clark * Times Literary Supplement * A work of two halves, both fiercely compelling and fresh... Superb blend of studied memoir and loosely sketched fiction * The Skinny * Exhilarating... Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe. The curving strip is like Lewis Carroll's looking glass * New York Times * Visceral, slippery... A brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human * Vanity Fair * Engaging... Acutely observed... Full of shrewd dialogue and delicately drawn characters * Literary Review * As a novelist, Lacey is one of the most experimental, fascinating, boundary-pushing of her generation * The Quietus *