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Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead.
In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months. Yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery, involving unseen letters by the great Dr. Johnson, grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure.
With echoes of both Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.
"Starred Review. Often enthralling and occasionally maddening, the novel expands the reader's sense of possibility even as it strains credulity." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Observations about science, medicine, psychology, love, madness, and literature result in a thought-provoking and engaging fusion of comedy and horror, irony and insight." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. The particulars of the science aside, this work is essentially asking a compelling question about identity: What makes us who we are? Here Philip K. Dick's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer meets Stephenie Meyer's The Host in this very highly recommended work." - Library Journal
"Strange Bodies is an examination of contemporary consciousness. But from its robust hook, through its comic set-up, to its dark if hopeful conclusions, it is also a kindly, intelligently entertaining thriller." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"A superb technological fantasy... Brilliantly imagined ... Wonderful." - The Times (UK)
This information about Strange Bodies 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.
Marcel Theroux is the author of four novels: A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and most recently, Far North, which is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist. He lives in London.
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