The Weight of Numbers
Published by Grove Atlantic
“Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Simon Ings’s remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counter-history, of the last sixty years.”—Mark Costello, author of Big If
The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom’s liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff.
The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.
“[A] Pynchon-on-speed romp . . . Ings’s mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core.”—Publishers Weekly
“A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.”—Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom’s liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff.
The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.
“[A] Pynchon-on-speed romp . . . Ings’s mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core.”—Publishers Weekly
“A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.”—Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin
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