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Satin Island

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About this listen

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015

Meet U. – a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them – all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.

Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together – a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.

As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.

 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Technothrillers Thriller & Suspense Fiction Thriller Technology

Critic reviews

Smart, shimmering and thought-provoking…McCarthy isn’t a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he’s a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful — in other words, compulsively readable.
Should you read the new Tom McCarthy book? (A: Yes. Always yes.)
Dazzling and elusive… a magisterial ethnographic portrait of our overstimulated, interconnected, simulacra-addicted times.
The kind of strange and ambitious fiction that you feared might have died with J. G. Ballard. ...Provokes and beguiles and, at the point of revelation, it withholds. On finishing it you will have the powerful urge to throw it across the room, then the powerful urge to pick it up to read again. And that’s what’s so brilliant. (Duncan White, 5 stars)
Confusing, clever and about to be massive.
For page-turning ideas, it’s a must.
Nails the modern condition of information overload (Anthony Cummins, 4 stars)
Satin Island is an undeniably dazzling piece of writing, a perfect tight circle of interlocking motifs, mini-treatises and allusions. (Theo Tait)
A Kafka for the Google Age.
Gripping... an elegant and eerie tale.
All stars
Most relevant
I liked the book, quite weird but philosophical. It's not for those who want to follow a simple story, the narrator jumps a lot from one report to another, but I liked to follow his thought. I first read Remainder by McCarthy and really liked it, very original. So that one still remains my favourite.
I don't understand why people didn't like the voice, I actually liked it a lot, it is in tune with the protagonist's shattered way of thinking.

When you focus on the details you forget the whole

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I love this book, it’s short, punchy, understated, a touch intellectual and postmodern, without sacrificing a good, witty and entertaining story.

Great book, wry, arch, witty

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Huge disappointment! Kept going - It had to be going somewhere? How wrong I was!

"Intoxicated by his own verbosity".

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What would have made Satin Island better?
Different narrator. He stops mid-sentence, emphasises random sounds, and genuinely struggles with words which have more than three syllables. I own over 200 audiobooks, but this is the first one I encountered where the narrator actually COULD NOT READ. Even authors, who are obviously not trained professionals, read their books much more professionally than this man. I am returning this book.

How could the performance have been better?
This narrator should be banned. It was like listening to recorded speaking exercises of someone who is working on their stuttering problem.

the worst narrator I ever encountered.

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Has Satin Island put you off other books in this genre?

Yes.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Boredom.

Any additional comments?

Pretentious, cliche-ridden and outright boring. One of the very few occasions I have given up half way!

Pretentious and cliche-ridden

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