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The Weight of Numbers
The Weight of Numbers
The Weight of Numbers
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The Weight of Numbers

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“Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Simon Ings’s remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counter-history, of the last sixty years.”—Mark Costello, author of Big If

The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom’s liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff.

The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.

“[A] Pynchon-on-speed romp . . . Ings’s mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core.”—Publishers Weekly

“A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.”—Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 1, 2007
ISBN9781555848576
The Weight of Numbers
Author

Simon Ings

Simon Ings is the author of eight previous novels and two works of non-fiction, including the Baillie Gifford longlisted Stalin and the Scientists. His debut novel Hot Head was widely acclaimed. He is the arts editor of New Scientist magazine and splits his time between a sweltering penthouse in Dubai (not his) and possibly the coldest flat in London. simonings.com @simonings

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