The Raw Shark Texts (35 page)
Thanks first and foremost to my wonderful and supportive girlfriend Charlotte Bozic–you’re amazing. Thanks to my great friend Maggie Hannan for absolutely everything, from Alvarez to Zest. Thanks to Toby Litt and Ali Smith for giving me a break in
New Writing 13
. Thanks to David Mitchell for the notes and the chocolate, to Scarlett Thomas for pointing me in the right direction and to my agent and friend Simon ‘The Shark’ Trewin for making all this happen. Thanks to Francis Bickmore, editor and partner in conceptual crime, for investing so much in Eric’s world and for all the hours of discussion and un-logic testing which have made such a difference to the finished book. Thanks to Jamie Byng–a man with jet fuel and enthusiasm for blood–for his unshakable belief in conceptual fish and to Jessica Craig for making so many other people believe in them too. Big thanks to everyone else at Canongate who has made every aspect of publishing
The Raw Shark Texts
such a fantastic experience (I hear there are other publishing houses, but I’m not sure I believe it…). Thanks to Jane Stubbs and Arts Council England, Yorkshire and to Paul Holloway and Hull City Arts Unit for all their help, support and faith. Thanks to James Russell, Helen Tuton and Rob Davie for their initial red pen work. Thanks to Abi Walker, Lee Fenton, Colin Hurst, Stephen Walker, Helen Ridler, Nick Broughton, Matt Clarke, Rebecca Woods, Paul Hardy, Mike Galvin and everyone else (you know who you are) for the years of fun and trouble that made this book possible. Thanks to my family for being so supportive and never saying, ‘So when are you going to get a real job?’. Final thank-yous to St John Donald, Katherine Butler and Peter Czernin for their ongoing work in evolving this Ludovician’s celluloid cousin.
“Part quest adventure, part glimpse into a strange mind…Fun,
intriguing and hard to put down.”
—
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
“A psychological thriller with shades of
Memento
and
The Matrix
and the fiction of Mark Danielewski; page-turning, playful and
chilling by turns.”
—
THE GUARDIAN
“Clever, exciting, funny…and moving.”
—
THE SUNDAY TIMES
“A horror-dystopic-philosophical mashup that has critics drawing
comparisons to Borges,
The Matrix
and
Jaws
’.
—
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
“A remarkable book. I felt that I was in such good hands—not safe
exactly, but assured. I loved the humanity of the characters. A very
original and compelling world.”
—LOUISE WELSH
“
Jaws
meets
Alice in Wonderland…
An avant-garde thriller in
which these devil-fish of the unconscious somehow escape the
symbolic realm.”
—
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“Fast, sexy, intriguing, intelligent—
The Raw Shark Texts
is all these
and more: a cult waiting to happen, a blockbuster begging to be
made. Steven Hall is a truly fantastic storyteller. Investigate, now!”
—TOBY LITT
“A great debut—clever, funny, touching, strange and highly
original.”
—AL ALVAREZ
“An absurdly confident and intriguing debut.”
—
ESQUIRE
“No novel with a cat called Ian in it can fail to win a place in my
heart.”
—
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
“Hall constructs the novel so that it travels close to the abyss, always
with the sense of imminent disintegration. It has the sick exhilaration
of the scariest carnival ride.”
—
NEWSWEEK
“Clever, touching and utterly thrilling.”
—
MARIE CLAIRE
(UK)
“A cult in the making.”
—
TIME OUT
“Hall’s debut, the darling of last year’s London Book Fair, is a
cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical
sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood.”
—
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Raw Shark Texts
© 2007 by Steven Hall. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40000-8
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, by arrangement with Canongate Books Ltd, Edinburgh and New York.
First Canadian edition: 2007
This trade paperback edition: 2008
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
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HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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A
8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hall, Steven, 1975-
The raw shark texts : a novel / Steven Hall.
ISBN:
978-0-00-200697-2
I. Title.
PR
6108.
A
54
R
39 2008 823’.92
C
2007-907030-2
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