A novel built from beginnings...

You buy a book called If On A Winter's Night a Traveller and sit down to read. The story stops mid-sentence. When you find another copy, it contains a different opening. Each attempt to continue leads to a new narrative that breaks off just as it gathers momentum.

As the Reader, you set out to track down the missing text. Along the way you encounter Ludmilla, another reader pursuing the same vanished book. What follows is a sequence of interrupted stories: thrillers, romances, political intrigues, each complete in its promise but not in its conclusion.

This novel turns reading itself into the central drama. The search for the next chapter becomes the plot. Every ending leads back to another beginning.

'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell

'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian

VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful