The Circumference of the World (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

In this stellar novel of dueling realities, a mathematician, a book dealer, and a mobster seek a notorious novel that disappears upon reading it. Only the author, a rakish science fiction writer, knows whether the book is truthful or a hoax, and time may be running out for all involved. Inventive, sly, and both intimate and cosmic in scope, multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar (Central Station; Neom) takes us from the emergence of life to the very ends of the universe, with birth, death and love celebrated in between.

Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics, and a novel that isn't supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. When both the book and Delia's husband Levi go missing, she hires a young, ill-qualified, face-blind book dealer, Daniel Chase, to find them.

The missing book was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley's novel, Lode Stars, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system made of three enormous black holes.

Oskar Lens, a Russian mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will also stop at nothing to get hold of Lode Stars. Lens firmly believes the novel provides protection from improbable, ubiquitous, and unseen aliens. He is determined to prove to Daniel that reality may be only an unreliable memory that is billions of years old.

But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe....