F: A Novel

A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity . . . It is a novel of deep beauty, psychological insight and, finally, compassion; a book that, in a world of fakes and manufactured objects of desire, is the real article: a bona fide, inimitable masterpiece - Times Literary SupplementKehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import - Jeffrey EugenidesIt is this sense of a world potent with significance that seems at once within our reach and beyond our grasp that forms the central concern of this most accomplished, humane and unsettling of novels - a work that registers how it is to feel so alive to the 'terrible beauty of things' as to feel the world is talking to us - Literary ReviewWhat a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real . . . High achievement - Ian McEwanIntelligent, acerbic and quietly surreal . . . Powering the narrative is the explosive fallout from the collision between fate and self-determination . . . Subtle and clever in all the right ways. Kehlmann's world is fully convincing while being philosophically challenging. He has a hypnotic effect, seducing us with his storytelling while provoking us to find meanings of our own - Saturday Telegraph'F is an intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speedfarce . . . Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light' - Adam ThirlwellDaniel Kehlmann braided art, religion and finance into a typically effervescent but heartfelt comedy-of-ideas about faith and fakery - IndependentDaniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel . . . conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us . . . Yet Kehlmann's ambitious narrative structure - the novel itself - provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly Mobius-strip-like connectedness, doesn't just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author's intended pattern by book's end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith - New York Times