The dazzling new novel by the Man Booker-nominated, Granta Best of Young British novelist, Ned Beauman.
*SUNDAY TIMES SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE YEAR*
'A novel that delights, dazzles and moves in equal measure' Financial Times
'Brutally satirical and grimly hilarious' Daily Mail
The irresistible new novel by the Booker-longlisted author Ned Beauman - a darkly funny and incisive zoological thriller for the age of Extinction Rebellion.
The venomous lumpsucker is the most intelligent fish on the planet. Or maybe it was the most intelligent fish on the planet. Because it might already be extinct. Nobody knows. And nobody cares. Except for two people.
Mining executive Mark Halyard has a prison cell waiting for him if that fish has gone for good. And biologist Karin Resaint needs it for her own darker purposes. They don't trust each other, but they're left with no choice but to team up, pursuing the lumpsucker across the strange landscapes of near-future Europe. On the way, they are drawn into a conspiracy far bigger than one ugly little fish.
Gripping and singular, Venomous Lumpsucker is a comedy about environmental devastation that asks: do we have it in us to avert the tragedy of mass extinction?
And also: do we really need to bother?
'A hilarious, terrifying novel in which Ned Beauman captures brilliantly the contradictory blend of urgency, paralysis, panic and resignation the climate emergency and its attendant mass extinctions inspire' Chris Power
A comic caper about our insanely decadent world careering through ecocide,
Venomous Lumpsucker is bracingly, excoriatingly funny on our idiocy and the unquantifiable loss that we enable. It's also savagely, forensically serious on the reality of mass species loss, as
illuminating as it is entertaining. It reads like P. G. Wodehouse crashing into Philip K. Dick, with a touch of Iain M. Banks. Of course, it's smart and timely, but the writing is often very beautiful, and the ideas and their implications vertiginous. Martin Macinnes, author of INFINITE GROUND
Ned Beauman is the author of Boxer, Beetle, winner of the Writers' Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction; The Teleportation Accident, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award; and the highly acclaimed Glow and Madness is Better Than Defeat. He lives in London.
www.nedbeauman.co.uk
www.nedbeauman.blogspot.co.uk
Über den Autor
Ned Beauman is the author of Boxer, Beetle, winner of the Writers' Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction; The Teleportation Accident, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award; and the highly acclaimed Glow and Madness is Better Than Defeat. He lives in London.
www.nedbeauman.co.uk
www.nedbeauman.blogspot.co.uk
Klappentext
Laugh-out-loud funny, with a page-turning plot, Venomous Lumpsucker is a speculative literary thriller for the age of Extinction Rebellion.
Laugh-out-loud funny, with a page-turning plot, Venomous Lumpsucker is a speculative literary thriller for the age of Extinction Rebellion.
The near future. With tens of thousands of species dying out every year, our last hope is the biobanks, impregnable vaults where their remnants can be preserved forever. Until one day an audacious cyberattack obliterates every single one.
In the aftermath, a troubled conservationist and a crooked mining exec must team up in search of the venomous lumpsucker, a lost fish that they both desperately need to save. Together, they pursue it through the weird landscapes of the 2030s - a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the Baltic Sea; the dangerous hinterlands of a totalitarian state. And the further they go, the deeper they're drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?
