Solenoid cover art

Solenoid

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Solenoid

By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

A highly acclaimed master work of fiction from Cartarescu, author of Blinding

Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.

©2022 Sean Cotter (P)2023 Tantor Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 My Struggle, Book 1 cover art
Elric of Melniboné cover art
Red Sorrow cover art
The Man Without Qualities cover art
Weird Tales Magazine No. 366: Sword & Sorcery Issue cover art
Bright Angel cover art
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1 cover art
The Aviator cover art
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana cover art
We cover art
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe cover art
Parfit cover art
All stars
Most relevant
So different from everything I have read before and very compelling, even if a plot is not so obvious, at least in the beginning. It is grounded in the reality of communist Romania under Ceausescu, with all its madness and poverty, mixed with autobiographical elements and surreal explorations of dreams and the subconscious. There is science, there is art, there is philosophy even some humour here and there. This doesn't quite cover it but I don't want to give too much away.

Unlike anything I have read before

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.