The Möbius Book
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Granta Books
Published:19th Jun '25
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A genre-bending story about breaking - both of the heart and literary form itself - from the critically-acclaimed author of Biography of X.
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.
A deliciously weird mix of theology, allegory and dark humour; The Möbius Book is every bit as brilliant and electrifying as everything Lacey has ever written -- Sara Baume
A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy... I was absolutely spellbound -- Leslie Jamison
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 *
'Every book Lacey writes is uniquely strange, but all of them investigate the slipperiness of storytelling... The novella cleverly weaves together many of the loose strands of experience and thought from the memoir to create a work about betrayal, self-sabotage and rupture... [The Möbius Book] makes you think deeply about how we construct stories to make sense of our lives' * The Times *
'[A] compulsively readable meditation on desire... The cathartic indictment of The Möbius Bookis what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous' * Observer *
'A work of two halves, both fiercely compelling and fresh... In this superb blend of studied memoir and loosely sketched fiction, matters that destabilise, from heartbreak to hunger, are given license to remain largely unreconciled' * The Skinny *
'Engaging... Acutely observed... Full of shrewd dialogue and delicately drawn characters' * Literary Review *
'Exhilarating... Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe' * New York Times *
'Visceral, slippery... A brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human' * Vanity Fair *
ISBN: 9781803511474
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages