The Rhyl Poster

A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, in the thrilling new novel from twice Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

'A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry' Chloe Aridjis

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star legal theorist in Europe’s highest court. But after he meets the enigmatic Pirotti, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced to pills his new handler calls petits bleus, Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti's colleagues - or just passing out - as he surrenders to sublime visions in which lurk dark traces of a violent incident back in Iraq.

Entrusted with the drafting of an epochal, landmark ruling, Stanton instead begins work on something else: a vast, sprawling 'confession' made up of patterns, markings and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world that he and those around him have so carefully constructed. To destroy it, certainly, but maybe, from that very act of ruination, to usher in a bright new beginning.

The Rhyl Poster crafts a hallucinatory landscape in which guilt – our own, and our whole era’s – is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

'The most visionary of contemporary writers' Neel Mukherjee

'Unfolds with the velocity of a thriller... Truly new, truly gut-flipping, truly exhilarating and vertiginous' Tim MacGabhann

'The high priest of the technological sublime' Ben Eastham