Description

A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, taking him into the dark heart of the systems that govern our world

‘A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry’ Chloe Aridjis, author of Booker-longlisted The Shadow of the Object

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star jurist in Europe’s highest court. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced to pills his new handler calls petit bleus, Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti’s colleagues – or just passing out.

Entrusted with the drafting of an epochal, landmark ruling, Stanton instead begins work on something else: a vast, sprawling ‘confession’ made up of patterns, markings and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world that he and those around him have so carefully constructed. To destroy it, certainly, but maybe, from that very act of ruination, to usher in a bright new beginning.

The Rhyl Poster crafts a hallucinatory landscape where guilt – our own, and our whole era’s – is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

‘The most visionary of contemporary writers’ Neel Mukherjee

‘The high priest of the technological sublime’ Ben Eastham

‘Unfolds with the velocity of a thriller… Truly new, truly gut-flipping, truly exhilarating and vertiginous’ Tim MacGabhann

Publisher Review

A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry. A hymn to all the unacknowledged legislators of the world, which hums with the living ghosts of systems, signals and geometry. — Chloe Aridjis The Rhyl Poster is an unspooling diagram of one person’s dark corner of everything. Tom McCarthy has brilliantly mapped the insidious abstract spaces that both house and trap us, and hauntingly suggests a way out. — David Musgrave The high priest of the technological sublime. McCarthy’s latest sifts through the information overload of our age, seeking out patterns, correspondences, transcendence, truth. Language here is an instrument to conjure awe, and the looping, hypnotic prose of The Rhyl Poster offers near-mystical glimpses of the systems underpinning late capitalism even as the plot rattles along like a spy thriller. — Ben Eastham Unfolds with the velocity of a thriller… Truly new, truly gut-flipping, truly exhilarating and vertiginous’ — Tim MacGabhann