Overview

""Highly entertaining. But it's not just one book; it's at least three in one, all of which are highly enjoyable. He plays cleverly with form and structure--not just as a gimmick but as a fundamental part of the story. Wolf Haas has mastered the rules of writing so completely that he can just as easily ignore them.""--Der Spiegel A clever, electrifying puzzle of a novel, inspired by MC Escher's optical illusions, in which two mirrored plots --a man waiting for an electrician and a mafia informant entering witness protection-- delightfully converge. Franz Escher is waiting for the electrician. His power outlet has a loose connection. To pass the time, he buries himself in a book about a Mafioso-turned-informant Elio Russo. Elio is in jail, awaiting his imminent release into witness protection. He has betrayed so many people that he fears for his life. Unable to sleep, he lies awake at night reading a book about a man named Franz Escher who's waiting for the electrician. His power outlet has a loose connection. . . So begins Wolf Haas's Short Circuit, an inventive new take on the detective novel. Styled after one of M. C. Escher's impossible drawings, its two stories gradually intertwine only to solve each other, culminating in one final short circuit. A phenomenon after its German publication, this brilliantly entertaining novel promises to defy all expectation.

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Wolf Haas was born in 1960 and has received multiple international prizes, including the Bremen Literature Prize, the Wilhelm Raabe Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize. His novels include Property, which won the 2024 Erich Kästner Prize; The Weather Fifteen Years Ago; Defense of the Missionary Position; Young Man; as well as nine Detective Brenner crime novels. He lives in Vienna. Jamie Bulloch's translations include Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes, which was long-listed for the 2016 IMPAC Award and the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, which won the 2014 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. He lives in London. Peter Noble is an experienced audiobook narrator. Born in South Africa, he was dragged by hippie musicians from his idyllic childhood, where he ran barefoot through rich and matted grass with his dog Bartok, to vegetarian communes from California to India via Lisbon, London, and Findhorn. He picked up a wide range of authentic local accents and character voices along the way.

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