Teaser Tuesday – 17th October, 2017

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Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This is my choice of the day:
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
8% An instant later she is flying at a wall. She recognises a print from the Dogs Playing Poker series by Coolidge, supposedly ubiquitous, but she realises this is the first time she has actually ever seen one, and then she hits. Hunter’s house is of distressingly solid construction. In a more modern dwelling this might cave in a plasterboard wall but not here. She slides down the wall and lands badly, and a huge shape, comically thuggish, blocks her view of the room.

BLURB: Gnomon, which took Harkaway more than three years to complete, is set in a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Pitched as “a mind-bending Borgesian puzzle box of identity, meaning and reality in which the solution steps sideways as you approach it”, it features: a detective who finds herself investigating the very society she believes in, urged on by a suspect who may be an assassin or an ally, hunting through the dreams of a torture victim in search of the key to something she does not yet understand; a banker who is pursued by a shark that swallows Fortune 500 companies; Saint Augustine’s jilted mistress who reshapes the world with miracles; a refugee grandfather turned games designer who must remember how to walk through walls or be burned alive by fascists; and a sociopath who falls backwards through time in order to commit a murder.

As you can see, I’m not very far into this one and it isn’t particularly straightforward. I’m just getting used to the writing style which is quite wordy and literary. I loved Gone-Away World and enjoyed Angelmaker, so I’m hoping that I’ll soon fully bond with this one and the pages will start turning themselves…

18 responses »

    • Yes – I managed to read another chunk of it last night and I’m now properly into it. It’s a book of ideas as much as a story and now I’ve relaxed into the reading style, I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

  1. Hi Sarah,

    I like wordy and descriptive writing, but I just don’t think I can even begin to get my head around this one, let alone cope with over 700 pages of it!

    Nick has however, selected some intriguing and interesting cover designs, which I enjoyed browsing.

    As you have enjoyed previous books by this author, I’m guessing that you just need a few more pages to get into the story and then you’ll be fine.

    Happy Reading 🙂

    Yvonne

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