The End of Mr. Y
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| The End of Mr. Y | |
| Author | Scarlett Thomas |
|---|---|
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Harcourt Books |
| Publication date | 2006 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 416 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0156031612 |
| Preceded by | PopCo (2004) |
'The End of Mr. Y' is a novel by British author Scarlett Thomas. It tells us about Ariel Manto, a lonely PhD student, who has been doing research on 19th century writer Thomas Lumas when she enters a second-hand bookshop and stumbles upon an extremely rare novel by him, The End of Mr. Y, first published in 1893. The book is rumoured to be cursed, and anyone who has ever read it has been found dead not long afterwards.
The novel tells how to enter the Troposphere – a place where all consciousness is connected, and you can surf other people’s thoughts. Ariel wonders if this could be true - it is in a novel, after all. She would rather have fiction than reality – which is just poverty and bad sex – anyway. And she wants to know everything, including everything about the Troposphere, and whether or not such a thing could exist. But soon she’s running for her life, surfing both fiction and reality as she tries to escape from the people who want her secrets.
The End of Mr. Y is a thought experiment wrapped in a contemporary adventure novel that asks questions about thought, language, destiny and the very limits of being and time.
It was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008.
