From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.

U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.

In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.

湯姆•麥卡锡（1969—），英國作傢、概念藝術傢。2005年齣版小說《記憶殘留》後一躍成為當代英國小說界最重要、最令人期待的原創作傢之一，被譽為“後現代文學的繼承人”。同時，作為國際靈航協會（International Necronautical Society，簡稱INS）的協作創始人，麥卡锡始終關注藝術和社會中的非本真性，以及重復或復製的首要性和原創性，並一再將這兩個命題運用到他的小說中。他的寫作手法精巧、復雜，充滿實驗性和先鋒性，旨在打破傳統的文字美學，卻絲毫無損閱讀的樂趣。

譯者 陳以侃，自由譯者、書評人。曾在上海交大和復旦學習英文，2012至2015年在上海譯文擔任編輯。譯有《海風中失落的血色饋贈》、《終極遊戲》，閤譯有《額爾金書信和日記選》、《格蘭塔•不列顛》等；偶作評論，見於《上海書評》、《三聯生活周刊》、《文景》、《書城》、《外國文藝》等。