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  • Published: 29 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529115949
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $26.00
Categories:

Appliance

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022



A novel for our times: the story of how technology and our addiction to innovation is eroding our human rights and freedoms

**Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 **

From the Costa Award winner, a highly inventive and and humane novel about our relationship with technology and our addiction to innovation.

This is the tale of a new technology, an alternative history that unfolds over many decades. It is a fable told through a constantly shifting cast of characters, all drawn into the world of a machine that slowly alters every life it touches.

But in this unending quest for progress, what will happen to the things that make us human: the memories, the fears, the love, the mortality? As we push towards a brave new world, what do we stand to lose?

'Such a super novel' Wendy Erskine

'A clever book...that will have you thinking about the machines in your own life' Sunday Times

  • Published: 29 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529115949
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $26.00
Categories:

About the author

J. O. Morgan

J. O. Morgan lives in Scotland. He is the author of six previous books, each a single, book-length poem. His last work, Assurances (2018), won the Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Natural Mechanical (2009) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His 2016 work, Interference Pattern, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Also by J. O. Morgan

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Praise for Appliance

These deceptively simple tales... reveal how magical technology does people absolutely no good whatsoever... superb.

The Times, Science Fiction Book of the Month

Superbly unsettling... Reading Appliance, I was put in mind of Asimov's I, Robot, for the way each story sheds light on a different moral angle of the book's world, and of ours... gripping.

Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph

Compelling... sketched with acid precision... Morgan's real skill is in finding the poetry of the conundrum

Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

Compelling... It is the Bildungsroman of something inhuman, and it is terrifying.

Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A serious-minded examination of the instinctive human ambivalence towards innovation.

Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A clever book, delivered confidently, that will have you thinking about the machines in your own life.

Sunday Times

Smart, subtle and blissfully jargon-free sci-fi stories from one of Britain's most acclaimed poets.

Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2022*

[With] poetic precision... Appliance most succeeds is in its little riot of the real in the face of digital abstraction.

Times Literary Supplement

Such a super book.

Wendy Erskine, author of Sweet Home and Dance Move

Appliance is a work of peculiar genius that gives the truth about modern technology.

The Times, *Sci-Fi Book of the Year*

Morgan's real skill is finding the poetry... in this fable-like, compelling novel.

Scotsman, *Books of the Year*

J.O. Morgan's novels are unmissable for their finely-worked prose and conceptual brilliance and Appliance is no exception.

White Review, *Books of the Year*