Circumference of the World

Caught between realities, a mathematician, a book dealer, and a mobster desperately seek a notorious book that disappears upon being read. Only the author, a rakish sci-fi writer, knows whether his popular novel is truthful or a hoax. In a story that is cosmic, inventive, and sly, multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) travels from the emergence of life to the very ends of the universe.“Ingeniously constructed and stylistically protean, this seven-course banquet of a novel glistens with the Golden Age of science fiction, even as it nourishes our neurons with a marvelous thought experiment.”—James Morrow, award-winning author of Shambling Towards HiroshimaDelia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn’t supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia’s husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer.The infamous novel Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley’s novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe? Classic science fiction meets Dianetics in this mysterious tale of an author who may have started his own religion; his mathemetician daughter; a reading-obsessed mobster; and a hapless young book dealerLavie Tidhar, who is based in London, has an international audience, and he appears regularly at annual academic and genre conferences in China, Japan, Spain, England, Scotland, and morePromotion at major trade and genre conventions, including the World Science Fiction convention; ALA; the Nebula Awards; and Readercon; targeting reviews from mainstream U.S. and British