"C" follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who - as his name suggests - surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flight-paths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.

Book Description
Publication Date: February 13, 2007
A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.
Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.
How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.
Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that "involved something falling from the sky," receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a "facilitator" he hires, things remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts (the fixing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more), each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound wealth has allowed him to create—even though he professes he doesn't "want to understand them." McCarthy's evocation of the narrator's absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant all the way through the abrupt climax. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Rejected in England before it was acquired by a small French publishing house, Tom McCarthy's debut novel is now a popular and critical success. The author, who in 1999 launched the semihoax International Necronautical Society (INS)—designed to map and colonize the space of death—transfers some of the Society's philosophical concerns to his novel. About human reality, social constructions, and the quest for identity, Remainder offers a highly original and insightful allegory of our times. In a clear, deadpan tone, the narrator, "an existential Everyman" (Los Angeles Times), tells a bizarre, disorienting, and compelling story. The vagueness may bother some readers, but most will enjoy pondering the ambiguity of it all.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
The nameless British narrator of McCarthy's clever debut is the sort of Everyman one would never want to be. He loses virtually all of his memory in a bizarre accident ("it involved something falling from the sky") and accepts an 8.5 million settlement from the responsible party on the condition that he won't speak a word about the tragic turn of events. Our hero is at a loss as to how to spend the money until, one evening at a friend's party, he experiences a strange flash of deja vu. Inspired by this snippet from his past, he hires a facilitator to help render an exact replica of the tenement-style building he once inhabited. He even holds a "casting call" to select the building's residents, whom he directs to repeatedly perform certain tasks. The narrator then orders reenactments of seemingly random events that run the gamut from inane to insane. Londoner McCarthy delivers crisp, precise prose, though his offbeat tale might have been rendered in far fewer words. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Hypnotically creepy . . . McCarthy’s portrait of the pursuit of total control is arresting, and he is alert to the bland amorality that underlies it.” —The New Yorker
“What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them. . . . McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make Remainder more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it’s a novel about plot . . . [McCarthy] is a new author who’s ambitious and intelligent.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Fresh, funny, and deeply disturbing.” —New York Magazine
“A novel of astonishing genius. . . . . It demands to be read in one sitting. So deftly does McCarthy absorb you into the mind of his hero that you quickly feel you are living with him inside his head. . . . The book caught me in such a delirious spin toward fragmentation and left me feeling every detail of the matter of life more keenly.” —Sarah Cook, The Believer
“Addictively strange.” —Details
“Tom McCarthy is shockingly talented. . . . Remainder is one of those novels that you finish and turn immediately back to the beginning, to fill in the gaps you may have missed the first time around. It leaves you feeling sort of shaken and very impressed.” —Gawker.com
“Nihilistically modern and classically structured. . . . Tightly knit, suspenseful . . . [Remainder] pursues an authenticity with the monomaniacal focus of Francis Ford Coppola circa Apocalypse Now. . . . McCarthy tells his tale calmly, as if taking long, yogic breaths.” —Bookforum
“Captivating and challenging. . . . Remainder isn't a mystery novel—there's no villain here apart from time and space—so if its core ripples with ambiguity, all the better for the reader, as this is a book to be read and then reread, rich as it is with its insights, daring as it is with its contradictions.” —Los Angeles Times
“The nameless narrator in this eerie debut is a Londoner severely injured in an accident. Months later, he received an £8.5 million settlement on the condition that he never speak about the payout or the incident again—not a problem, since he doesn’t remember it. Our hero then begins to wholly recreate and re-enact portions of his old life with a salaried cast of extras, set designers, and stuntmen. In taut and chilly prose, McCarthy describes how this mission becomes a disturbing obsession; the horrifying conclusion is visible 30 pages off, but it’s no less shocking when it arrives.” —Entertainment Weekly, A-
“Tom McCarthy’s first novel offers a vivid, subtle portrait of creeping madness.” —Time Out New York
“A quick and gritty novel that begs, thanks largely to a cinematic plot, to be read in one sitting.” —BookSlut
“A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects, happiness.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude
“Remainder is a beautifully strange and chilly book. Very smart and unlike anything else you're likely to read.” —Scott Smith, author of The Ruins
“Tom McCarthy has a singularity, a precision, a surreal logic and a sly wit that is all his own. It will be a long time before you read a stranger book—or a truer one.” —Rupert Thomson, author of Divided Kingdom
“It will remain with you long after you have felt compelled to re-read it.” —Time Out London
“An assured work of existential horror. . . . Perfectly disturbing.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Strangely gripping. . . . Remainder should be read (and, of course, reread) for its intelligence and humour.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.
U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.
In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.

"C" follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who - as his name suggests - surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flight-paths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt. Reminiscent of Bolano, Beckett and Pynchon, this is a remarkable novel - a compelling, sophisticated and sublimely imaginative book uncovering the hidden codes and dark rhythms that sustain life.

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.
Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.
How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.
Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

The acclaimed author of Remainder, which Zadie Smith hailed as “one of the great English novels of the past ten years,”gives us his most spectacularly inventive novel yet.
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.
After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful—and perhaps fateful—climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb . . .
Only a writer like Tom McCarthy could pull off a story with this effortless historical breadth, psychological insight, and postmodern originality.

The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy—acclaimed author of Remainder and C—Men in Space it is set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism. It follows an oddball cast—dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut—as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. Planting the themes that McCarthy’s later works develop, here McCarthy questions the meaning of all kinds of space—physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical—as reflected in the characters’ various disconnections. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.
With an afterword by Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers
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“McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories.”
—The Observer (London)
“A confident and intelligent meditation on failed flights of transcendence.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“[McCarthy] is the standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel.”
—Slate
“A compelling and imaginative philosophical novel; McCarthy describes a world in which we are only occasionally party to brief, frightening intimations of greater forces at work, like the mysterious half-tuned transmissions at the ends of a radio dial.”
—Frieze Magazine
“McCarthy [is] a formidable talent as a novelist.”
—The Nation

Arguing that the Tintin books' characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamed up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: Is Tintin literature? Taking a cue from Tintin himself who spends much of his time tracking down illicit radio signals, entering crypts, and decoding puzzles McCarthy suggests that we too need to tune in” and decode if we want to capture what's going on in Hergé's extraordinarily popular work. What emerges from McCarthy's examination of Tintin is a remarkable story of illegitimacy and deceit, in both Hergé's work and his own family history. McCarthy's irresistibly clever, tightly constructed book shows how the themes Tintin generates expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour, and anxieties around questions of forgery and fakes are the same that have fueled and troubled writers from the classical era to the present day.

Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?

Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers' movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a 'perfect' movement, one that would ''''change everything''''?

An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: places where the frontiers of potential - to cure, kill, understand or entertain - are constantly tested and refined. And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation , an epic space tragedy.

Audacious and mesmeric, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual-motion machine. Tom McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying historical and symbolic structures of human experience.