Felix Culpa

A work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.

A writer is on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy's story, will he lose his own?

Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else's.

“"The way the disparate voices reflect the narrator's question of identity is just as poetic as the language itself, and creates an immersive representation of the narrator's experience. This is one for those avid readers who like a challenge, and who can't get enough of the literary giants of modern history, only this time in a new, repurposed format."”

"Felix Culpa is extraordinary: a wild, beautiful book which patchworks tiny scraps of other novels to create something haunting, resonant and absolutely original."
--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

"One of our more innovative, quietly inventive and exciting novelists."
--Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement

"[Gavron merges] detective story, mythic romance and medieval quest into a short, affecting parable for modern times...It would be easy to become overly aware of the novel's self-conscious form, but Gavron is too subtle and skillful for that."
-- Financial Times

"Felix Culpa is a brilliantly eccentric accomplishment--one that is difficult, on a single reading, fully to appreciate--and it raises fascinating questions about authorship, plagiarism, and textual integrity...Felix Culpa's ingenious appropriations bring the dead to life and offer the living a parallel existence in very good company."
--Times Literary Supplement

"[I]n its "sources, a gripping atmosphere is often conjured by what we're not clearly told...Like a Hannah Hoch piece, Felix Culpa uses collage with impressive purpose."
--The Daily Telegraph

"Perhaps [Gavron's] boldest experiment yet."
--Monocle"

"[An] extraordinary work of fictional alchemy."
--BBC Radio 4

Jeremy Gavron is the author of six books, including A Woman on the Edge of Time, a memoir about his mother's suicide. He lives in London, and teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

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