G The Great Chain of Unbeing (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback) - Tapa blanda

Crumey manages to make his intricacy marvellous. As carefully constructed as a Book of Kells marginal design, this novel avoids the chill that might have attached to such a virtuosic technical exercise, in part because it is often very funny and because it has real heart. The Great Chain of Unbeing is unboring, unusual and quite brilliant. Adam Roberts in The Literary Review --Adam Roberts in The Literary Review

This is Crumey's first short story collection, after seven novels. It is a delightful introduction to his singularly riddling work - and in Crumeyesque style it is an intermezzo that doubles as an overture. For those, like I, who have read all his work it is a joy to see familiar themes and beats and characters in an askance way. For a reader who has not experienced his work, it is a self-contained introduction to the oeuvre and his mythos. It is in some ways a novel masquerading as a short story collection... Although there is both wit and insight in this collection, there is an undertow of melancholy. It circles around human failings even in alien circumstances. The longest piece, 'The Assumption' has the queasy ennui of Thomas Mann's Death In Venice. There is a sense of desperate repetition: the same tribulations, the same deceits, the same prevarications. If, as in Crumey's horrific thought experiments, everything happens again and again and again, then it is at least a consolation that I shall read this again and again and again. --Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman

Andrew Crumey's novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey's acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being.