“The Cockroach” – Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan – The Cockroach – Jonathan Cape / Vintage / Penguin Random House UK, 2019

A cockroach wakes up one morning in 10 Downing Street to find itself transformed into the British Prime Minister overnight. It then sets on to relentlessly pursue the highly controversial and utterly foolish policy of Reversalism (subtext: Brexit) which aims to achieve the capitalist wet dream of perpetual circulation by inverting the economy so that people begin receiving money instead of paying money when they go shopping and in turn must now pay their employers instead of receiving wages. This madcap scheme is to restore Britain’s former imperial glory and make it once again a global leader. Nonetheless, this fantasy can only become a reality if the rest of the world can be convinced to follow suit and adopt Reversalism, which seems rather unlikely…Written shortly before Brexit became an inevitability, this satirical novella is not only a timely critique of “post-truth politics” but also a witty and hilarious rendition of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Highly recommended!

Book Cover © Penguin Random House UK, 2019

“The Peace Machine” – Özgür Mumcu (Trans. Mark David Wyers)

“A dark funny absurdist romp” – SFX

“We’ll create a machine. A peace machine that will put an end to all wars. What if conflict were not inevitable? What if a machine could exploit the latest developments in electromagnetic science to influence people’s minds? What if such a machine could put an end to violence for ever?

This wonderfully original Ottoman steampunk novel is both a rollicking historical adventure story and an incredibly powerful and important book for our times ” (Pushkin Press, 2018).

“As the twentieth century dawns the world stands on the brink of yet another bloody war. But what if conflict were not inevitable? What if a machine could exploit the latest developments in electromagnetic science to influence people’s minds? And what if such a machine could put an end to violence for ever?

The search for the answer to these questions will lead our hero Celal away from his unassuming life as an Istanbul-based writer of erotic fiction, and on a quest across a continent stumbling headlong towards disaster from Istanbul to Paris and Belgrade, as he struggles to uncover the mystery of The Peace Machine before time runs out for humanity” (Pushkin Press, 2018).

Özgür Mumcu is a Turkish author, free speech activist and journalist working for the Cumhuriyet newspaper in Turkey. In 2016 he accepted a Right Livelihood award on the newspaper’s behalf for its “fearless investigative journalism and commitment to freedom of expression in the face of oppression, censorship, imprisonment and death threats”. The Peace Machine is his first novel.

Bricks and Mortar – Clemens Meyer (Trans. Katy Derbyshire)

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE & WINNER OF ENGLISH PEN AWARD

‘A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’
— Chris Petit

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’
— A. L. Kennedy

‘The point of Bricks and Mortar is that nothing’s “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’
— Joshua Cohen

“Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…

In his most ambitious book to date, Clemens Meyer pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like Alfred Döblin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch.

Clemens Meyer was born 1977 in Halle and lives in Leipzig. After high school he jobbed as a watchman, building worker and removal man. He studied creative writing at the German Literary Institute, Leipzig and was granted a scholarship by the Saxon Ministry of Science and Arts in 2002. His first novel, Als wir träumten, was a huge success and for his second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter, a collection of short stories, he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2008. Bricks and Mortar, his latest novel, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and was awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis 2014.

Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for twenty years. She translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Simon Urban, Annett Gröschner and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter was published as All the Lights by And Other Stories in 2011.She occasionally teaches translation and also co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show.”

Fitzcarraldo Editions