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A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.
Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her 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 across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith's inherent danger.
What are you reading this week? (7/17/2025)
I just finished https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/21139/the-m%C3%B6bius-book The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey. I'm a fan of her work, but don't know if I'd recommend it to anyone else. I'm about to start https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/e...
-Ann_Beman
"Is it a memoir or a novel or a little of both? Better to categorize Lacey's latest as its own genre, a category-defining, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more...Unlike life, there is no beginning or end, just a story that follows its own strange, wild, and mesmerizing pattern. A sui generis work, like no other." —Booklist (starred review)
"A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss...There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer...A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[The Mobius Book] expands the craft explored in [Biography of X] but offers a nakedness of spirit that few artists have explored as deftly as she does." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Novelist Lacey reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender...her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author's fans will be glad they took the plunge." ―Publishers Weekly
"Catherine Lacey has been climbing up the literary ladder ever since her magnificent debut novel...Now comes The Möbius Book, a hybrid fiction-memoir written in the wake of a brutal breakup. Lacey was named as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2017, and rightly so — this new one runs the emotional gamut." ―The Telegraph
"Catherine Lacey continues to probe and puncture the membrane between what is real and what is imagined...curious and entirely unique." ―Vulture
"A hybrid work of fiction and nonfiction, a genre-bending work that traces her relationship with her ex partner and with her former religious faith. Lacey's work always surprises me and offers something totally new...sure to be striking and singular." ―LitHub
"Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth." ―Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
"A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy: What remains unknown (indeed, often unknowable) at the core of the people we know best? And how do we survive this unknowing? This wry, surprising, nimble book--allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight--achieves what only great art can manage: to be both impossible to imagine, and utterly necessary. I was absolutely spellbound." ―Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
This information about The Möbius Book was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Willy Somma
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.
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