You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Jonathan Cape has signed an “audacious and mesmeric” new novel by Tom McCarthy, The Making of Incarnation.
Publishing director Michal Shavit acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Jonathan Pegg at JPLA, to be published on 16th September 2021.
“Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret,” the synopsis explains. “Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers’ movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a ‘perfect’ movement, one that would ‘change everything’?
“An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: medical labs, CGI studios, military research centres . . . And all the while, work is under way on the blockbuster film 'Incarnation', an epic space tragedy."
McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His third novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the European Literature Prize and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. Both were published by Vintage. In 2013 the Berlin-based writer was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University.
Shavit said: ‘‘We’re hugely excited to be publishing Tom McCarthy’s first new novel since his Booker and Goldsmiths-shortlisted Satin Island. Daring and wildly imaginative, The Making of Incarnation is Tom’s most ambitious work yet: written with the narrative propulsion of a classic spy thriller, it’s a many-layered, kaleidoscopic novel set against a vast canvas that celebrates the beauty and art of bodies in motion.”
McCarthy added: “Young, clever and adventurous, Michal Shavit and the team that she’s amassed around her are a dream to work with. I couldn’t imagine a better home for this book.”