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The Rhyl Poster
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781807842949
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Ben Allen
  • RRP: $38.00

The Rhyl Poster

Formats & editions
Paperback
8 May 2027
Tr. Paperback
10 Nov 2026
Hardback
5 Dec 2026
EBook
5 Nov 2026
Audiobook
5 Nov 2026
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A brilliant and troubled jurist in Europe’s highest courts becomes a double agent, in the thrilling and atmospheric new novel from Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

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

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star jurist in Europe’s highest court. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti at a conference in the Swiss Alps, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced by his new handler to pills he calls petits bleus, which take away the pain of his war wound, Stanton surrenders to sublime visions in which lurk dark traces of a violent incident back in Iraq.

Soon Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti’s colleagues – or just passing out. The court starts to detect leaks in security but suspects anyone other than its favoured legal theorist. Indeed, it is Stanton who is asked to draft a new, landmark ruling, more important and far-reaching than anything he has written before.

But Stanton has been working on something else: a vast, sprawling document made up of markings, patterns and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world which 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 where guilt – our own, and our whole era’s – is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

Praise for Tom McCarthy:

'A Kafka for the Google age' Daily Telegraph

'The most visionary of contemporary writers' Neel Mukherjee
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781807842949
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Ben Allen
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

About the author

Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His third novel, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the Europese Literatuurprijs and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.
portrait photo of Tom McCarthy

Also by Tom McCarthy

Satin Island
C
The Making of Incarnation
See all

Praise for The Rhyl Poster

The Rhyl Poster is an unspooling diagram of one person's dark corner of everything. Tom McCarthy has brilliantly mapped the insidious abstract spaces that both house and trap us, and hauntingly suggests a way out.

David Musgrave

The high priest of the technological sublime. McCarthy's latest sifts through the information overload of our age, seeking out patterns, correspondences, transcendence, truth. Language here is an instrument to conjure awe, and the looping, hypnotic prose of The Rhyl Poster offers near-mystical glimpses of the systems underpinning late capitalism even as the plot rattles along like a spy thriller.

Ben Eastham

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

Tim MacGabhann

A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry. A hymn to all the unacknowledged legislators of the world, which hums with the living ghosts of systems, signals and geometry.

Chloe Aridjis

An excellent novel, a perfect fit for an over-circuited world… offers the rewards of a thriller but with frequent doses of modernist excess… has whiffs of le Carré and Grisham

Adam Dalva, New York Times

Striking... concerned with data, prediction and surveillance... The end of the novel unfolds powerfully

Times Literary Supplement

The manner in which McCarthy animates it is startlingly ambitious… McCarthy’s prose [is] at once hallucinatory and precise

Financial Times

One of the most iconoclastic novelists currently working

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

The most European-minded of contemporary British novelists

New Statesman

For a relatively slender work, Tom McCarthy’s new novel is breathtakingly byzantine… McCarthy is one of the handful of contemporary novelists whom I think of as not just a genius, but a radical genius

Scotsman

A genre-curious mashup of trauma plot and heist narrative

Guardian