‘More accurate, perhaps, to describe it as resting on a plane, rather than plain: one geometric shape that sat atop another. As to its size: this, too, was far from clear. It was hard, in these visions, to maintain a sense of scale. Sometimes it seemed enormous, like an emperor’s mausoleum; at others it appeared no larger than a trunk, or coffin; at others still, the size of a child’s toy- or music-box. The only constant or unchanging aspect of it was that it was black: black and inscrutable, opaque.’ Satin Island 2015
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award. His third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University in 2013.