The Somnambulist

'Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.' So starts the extraordinary tale of Edward Moon, detective, his silent sidekick the Somnambulist and a devilish plot to recreate the apocalyptic prophecies of William Blake and bring the British Empire crashing down. With a gallery of vividly grotesque characters, a richly evoked setting and a playful highly literate style this is an amazingly readable literary fantasy and a brilliant debut.

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy Chloe Aridjis’s stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, “infusing them with a noble life force.” In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings. Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases “the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book” (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.

'[A] lively, entertaining blend of murder mystery and supernatural adventure' George R. R. Martin Should you find yourself in need of a discreet investigation, think of Jesperson and Lane . . . For several years Miss Lane was companion, collaborator and friend to the lady known to the Psychical Society only as Miss X - until she discovered that Miss X was actually a fraud. Now Miss Lane works with Mr Jasper Jesperson as a consulting detective, but the cases are not as plentiful as they might be and money is getting tight - until a wife's concern for her husband's nocturnal ramblings piques their interest, and mediums begin to disappear all over London. There is only one team with the imagination and intelligence to uncover the nefarious purpose behind the vanished psychics and the somnambulist's wanderings. Jesperson and Lane: at your service.

'Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.' So starts the extraordinary tale of Edward Moon, detective, his silent sidekick the Somnambulist and a devilish plot to recreate the apocalyptic prophecies of William Blake and bring the British Empire crashing down. With a gallery of vividly grotesque characters, a richly evoked setting and a playful highly literate style this is an amazingly readable literary fantasy and a brilliant debut.

Patrick is a perfectly normal penguin, except for the fact that he walks in his sleep.

'Philosophy of Mind' is the third part of Hegel's encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, in which he summarises his philosophical system. It is one of the main pillar's of his thought.