The narrator of this astonishingly inventive novel is not a human but a book: a first edition of Joseph Roth's masterpiece Rebellion, rescued from a Nazi book-burning in 1933. In recounting its history as well as its contents, it tells a multitude of stories: of Andreas, the character who lives in its pages; of its current owner, a woman whose discovery of a hand-drawn map on a blank page begins a thrilling mystery; and of Roth himself, a Jewish Austrian writer on the run. Hugo Hamilton weaves art, nationalism, the weight of history, and the strange connections between us.

"Brilliant. A rich, strange book, with a beautiful ending."—Tessa Hadley