The Circumference of the World

Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn't supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. When Delia's husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer. Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley's novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system with three black holes. Oskar Lens, a Russian science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, is determined to find a copy of Lode Stars. Oskar believes that the novel provides protection from unseen aliens, and that reality is only an unreliable memory that is billions of years old. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?

"Ingeniously constructed and stylistically protean, this seven-course banquet of a novel glistens with the Golden Age of science fiction, even as it nourishes our neurons with a marvelous thought experiment." —James Morrow, award-winning author of Shambling Towards Hiroshima