Sylvie's Riddle - Tapa dura

'Intellectually engaging and deeply moving, Sylvie's Riddle explores the connection between the images we construct and the way we make sense of our world. Its subtle brew of invention, compassion and wit make it a wonderfully inventive novel of ideas. It is Alan Wall's finest novel yet.' - Andrew Hitchcock

Sylvie Ashton spends her life pursuing images. In her work at the Signum Institute in Liverpool she stares for hours at images of stars, like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, or the sort provided by the Hubble Telescope. She is trying to understand the way we fashion the world through our lenses, and how the images we create become so embedded in our lives that we can no longer escape them. The author of Bless the Thief and The School of Night has written a book about memory and betrayal, about the images we create and those we are relentlessly pursued by. In 2003, Alan Wall was awarded an Arts Council/AHRB Fellowship to work for a year with the particle physicist Goronwy Tudor Jones at Birmingham University. This novel is the first book-length result of that fertile year.