Time travel, deep-sea diving and the quest for the holy grail are improbable ingredients of this delightfully surreal comedy. Paul is a young physicist and keen swimmer, unable to get over his ex and frustrated by his lowly research job. He meets an older woman novelist, Molly, and finds himself becoming part of something called The Story. Is it a game, a secret society, an elaborate hoax? Paul's search for an answer takes him to high-class casinos, London doss-houses and several hundred feet underwater. Fiendishly clever and charmingly silly, this is an intellectual farce in the spirit of Flann O'Brien or Raymond Queneau. AUTHOR: Robert Irwin (1946-2024) was a novelist, historian, critic, scholar, and a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of eleven novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997), Satan Wants Me (1999) Wonders Will Never Cease (2016), My Life is Like a Fairy Tale (2019), The Runes Have Been Cast (2021), Tom's Version (2023) and Rapture of the Deep(2025). He was working on the final instalment of his trilogy of novels, Rapture of the Deep, when he died in 2024, using his notes and his own imaginatiomn Andrew Crumey has completed the novel and The Molliad Trilogy is now complete. All his novels have enjoyed substantial publicity and commercial success although he is best known for The Arabian Nightmare which has been translated into twenty languages and is considered by many critics to be one of the great literary fantasy novels of the twentieth century. Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he taught creative writing at Northumbria University before taking early retirement to write full time. He is the author of nine works of fiction: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D'Alembert's Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia(2008, Dedalus edition 2015)) and The Secret Knowledge (2013), The Great Chain of Unbeing(2018)and Beethoven's Assassins (2023. Andrew Crumey's novels have been translated into 16 languages. He has recently finished Robert Irwin's last novel Rapture ofthe Deep which was left unfinished at his death using Robert Irwin's notes and his own imagination. Rapture of the Deep will be published in the autumn of 2025.
