The Moebius Book
Published on 19. June 2025
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-80351-147-4 (ISBN)
Description
The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.
A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Moebius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith's inherent danger.
A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Moebius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith's inherent danger.
Reviews / Votes
A deliciously weird mix of theology, allegory and dark humour; The Moebius Book is every bit as brilliant and electrifying as everything Lacey has ever written -- Sara Baume A page-turner in both directions, The Moebius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy... I was absolutely spellbound -- Leslie Jamison A brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls -- Meghan O'Rourke A fiction-memoir hybrid... A literary highlight of the spring * Telegraph * 'Memoir collides with invention in a brilliant interrogation of art, faith and relationships... Catherine Lacey's work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Moebius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else. Life writing, autofiction, memoir? Whatever you call it, The Moebius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention... Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play... [There's] sharply modern intellectual rigour on display here' -- Sarah Moss * Guardian * 'Every book Lacey writes is uniquely strange, but all of them investigate the slipperiness of storytelling... The novella cleverly weaves together many of the loose strands of experience and thought from the memoir to create a work about betrayal, self-sabotage and rupture... [The Moebius Book] makes you think deeply about how we construct stories to make sense of our lives' * The Times * '[A] compulsively readable meditation on desire... The cathartic indictment of The Moebius Bookis what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous' * Observer * 'A work of two halves, both fiercely compelling and fresh... In this superb blend of studied memoir and loosely sketched fiction, matters that destabilise, from heartbreak to hunger, are given license to remain largely unreconciled' * The Skinny * 'Engaging... Acutely observed... Full of shrewd dialogue and delicately drawn characters' * Literary Review * 'Exhilarating... Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe' * New York Times * 'Visceral, slippery... A brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human' * Vanity Fair *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 139 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
332 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80351-147-4 (9781803511474)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels THE ANSWERS, NOBODY IS EVER MISSING, PEW and BIOGRAPHY OF X, and the collection of stories CERTAIN AMERICAN STATES. She has won a Whiting Award, was twice shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Her books have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch & German. She was born in Mississippi and is based in New York and Mexico.