F (A Novel)

Artful and subversive, F tells the story of the Friedland family – fakers, all of them – and the day when the fate in which they don’t quite believe catches up with them.

Having achieved nothing in life, Arthur Friedland is tricked on stage by a hypnotist and told to change everything. After he abandons his three young sons, they grow up to be a faithless priest, a broke financier and a forger. Each of them cultivates absence. One will be lost to it.

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‘A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity’ – John Burnside

`Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel . . . conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us . . . Yet Kehlmann's ambitious narrative structure - the novel itself - provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly Möbius-strip-like connectedness, doesn't just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author's intended pattern by book's end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith` – New York Times