Novel Machines

The new novel from the master storyteller is his best in years. Brilliantly McEwan, richly entertaining, a moving love story and a mystery--yet for all its gripping plotline one of the most morally layered novels written for our times, as it carries us into a provocatively real alternative history and the profound challenges of Artificial Intelligence. Set in 1980s London, the story revolves around Charlie: young and reckless, and in love with his upstairs neighbour, the enchanting Miranda whose hidden, murky past hangs between them. He has spent his inheritance on the acquisition of one of twenty-five highly developed new robotic humans--named Adam or Eve, each one beautiful, strong and clever--developed by Alan Turing after his success on the legendary WW2 Enigma codebreaking machine. As London is consumed by the huge protests over England and Argentina's Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher's jingoistic ambitions, Charlie courts Miranda, and his Adam finds himself, inevitably, central to their affair. Great novelist that he is, McEwan pulls us into the question of what it means to love, what makes us human in our fast-changing times, what might follow if a machine understands too well the human heart, and how precarious a construct is the world we live in and think we know.

Originally published in 1980. The first section of The Novel-Machine consists of five short chapters that rewrite Autobiography as an undisguised theory of realistic fiction, exploring its paradoxes while placing it in the context of mid-Victorian criticism. Chapters 6 and 7 survey the manifestations in Trollope's novels of what his theory sets down as the primary difference of realism: its way of telling its readers how to read. Chapter 8 is a close reading of He Knew He Was Right, a neglected novel that, in Kendrick's estimation, deserves to stand in much higher critical esteem than it does. Kendrick shows how deeply woven into the texture of Trollope's writing the rhetoric of realism is. Kendrick's reading is a departure from the usual method of criticizing Trollope—surveying the whole of his work a novel at a time, saying a little about every novel and always too little about each.

In a near-future America, a sentient computer program named Charlotte has turned terrorist, but Lee Fisher, the closeted son of an ultraconservative President, is more concerned with keeping his Secret Service detail from finding out about his developing romance with Nico, the new guy at school, but when the spider-like robots that roam the school halls begin acting even stranger than usual, Lee realizes he is Charlotte's next target.

Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife's forceps; Ann Radcliffe's gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. In Novel Machines, however, Joseph Drury argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself. Like other kinds of machine, a narrative is an artificial construction composed of different parts that combine to produce a sequence of causally linked actions. Like other machines, a narrative is designed to produce predictable effects and can therefore be put to certain uses. Such affinities had been apparent to critics since Aristotle, but they began to assume a particular urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel's narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern 'invention' that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period's moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel's narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period's most characteristic and influential formal innovations.

A haunting story of guilt and blame in the wake of a drowning, the first novel by the author of Spectacle Susan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers—both locals and wealthy out-of-towners—during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless. A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that race down the page. This restless approach gains focus and power through a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel—relentless and bold—that only Susan Steinberg could have written.

For those who know... that something is going on... The witnesses are legion, scattered across the world and dotted through history, people who looked up and saw something impossible lighting up the night sky. What those objects were, where they came from, and who—or what—might be inside them is the subject of fierce debate and equally fierce mockery, so that most who glimpsed them came to wish they hadn’t. Most, but not everyone. Among those who know what they’ve seen, and—like the toll of a bell that can’t be unrung—are forever changed by it, are a pilot, an heiress, a journalist, and a prisoner of war. From the waning days of the 20th century’s final great war to the fraught fields of Afghanistan to the otherworldly secrets hidden amid Nevada’s dusty neverlands—the truth that is out there will propel each of them into a labyrinth of otherworldly technology and the competing aims of those who might seek to prevent—or harness—these beings of unfathomable power. Because, as it turns out, we are not the only ones who can invent and build...and destroy. Featuring actual events and other truths drawn from sources within the military and intelligence community, Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley offer a tale at once terrifying, fantastical, and perhaps all too real. Though it is, of course, a work of... fiction?

Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God. Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.

Over 100,000 copies sold 'A tapestry of strong characters and accomplished writing' Herald Scotland It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, in Edinburgh, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than a hundred years after his grandmother’s sewing machine was made, Fred discovers a treasure trove of documents. His family history is laid out before him in a patchwork of unfamiliar handwriting and colourful seams. He starts to unpick the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.