The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (HC)

The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional 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 that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith's inherent danger.

REVIEWS

"A brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls" - Meghan O'Rourke

"A fiction-memoir hybrid... A literary highlight of the spring" ― Telegraph

"'Memoir collides with invention in a brilliant interrogation of art, faith and relationships... Catherine Lacey's work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Möbius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else. Life writing, autofiction, memoir? Whatever you call it, The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention... Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play... [There's] sharply modern intellectual rigour on display here'" - Sarah Moss ― Guardian