The Book Lovers

The kidnap of a rebellious heiress leads Inspector Nightjar into a steampunk underworld of brain love, greed and revolution. Can the Raven Method uncover the big Truth? What powers Thousand Tower City? Why are books telling unfamiliar stories? How cosy is anarchy?

Steve Aylett, author of LINT (chosen by Stewart Lee on R4's A Good Read) and Slaughtermatic, returns in this fizzing caper about “the good sin of thinking for yourself”.

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens." — Alan Moore, author of Watchmen

"Every sentence is a wonderland, every phrase a treat. No one writes like Steve Aylett. I am so glad that he is back. With each book it is as if he changes the possibilities of our imagination and populates your mind with new shapes and forms." — Robin Ince, comedian, author, broadcaster and co-host of the award-winning Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox.

“Aylett is the greatest absurdist of our age and worthy of comparison with William Burroughs – elegant, witty and absolutely his own writer. Lay back and immerse yourself in this wonderful book. Wise – wonderful – hilarious! Entertainment for everyone who believes there is nothing worth reading any more!” — Michael Moorcock

One of ARB’s 2024 Notable Books

"In the whole of language there is nothing like Steve Aylett, and The Book Lovers is his most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses. Every sentence is a nifty seizure that will slug his reader through the printed page into a better and less reasonable world, a fugue-state heaven of excruciating beauty that spends dazzling insight as though it were chocolate money. Utterly astonishing, and possibly some manner of police procedural. Read this now before it happens."

— Alan Moore

"Every sentence is a wonderland, every phrase a treat. No one writes like Steve Aylett. I am so glad that he is back. With each book it is as if he changes the possibilities of our imagination and populates your mind with new shapes and forms." – Robin Ince

On R4's A Good Read, comedian Stewart Lee chose Lint by Steve Aylett as his favourite book.

“Aylett is the greatest absurdist of our age and worthy of comparison with William Burroughs – elegant, witty and absolutely his own writer. Lay back and immerse yourself in this wonderful book. Wise – wonderful – hilarious! Entertainment for everyone who believes there is nothing worth reading any more!” – Michael Moorcock

"Aylett’s unparalleled command of language and rhythm fuels the momentum of his storytelling and vice versa. Distinguished by his signature style and sense of humour, The Book Lovers is another example of how he reinvents himself with every novel while always remaining distinctly Aylettesque." – D Harlan Wilson

"That astonishing author Steve Aylett, whose previous books have set the gold standard for the fantastical and the absurd, now emerges with perhaps his best novel yet. The Book Lovers is steampunk run through a Max Ernst filter. Full of vivid, nonpareil characters who combine Victorian attitudes with modernist concerns, and who speak in powerfully gnomic utterances that nonetheless advance the complex narrative in steps as clear as a one-eyed man’s glass eye, the book is full of suspense, thrills, laughs, miracles and real humanity. An existential farce with a beating heart of gold. It’s an axe of juicy language that splits the frozen ice-cream sandwich in our souls.” — Paul Di Filippo, author of Vangie’s Ghosts

"...a steampunk noir masterpiece....all I know for sure is that I read the book twice and I loved it." – Bill Ectric, Wormwoodiana

Summing up The Book Lovers is like trying to describe a spaceship to a badger via the medium of mime. You can communicate broad strokes, but key elements will inevitably be lost in translation. That's because some books are meant to be read. On paper, the story seems relatively simple. A princess with a penchant for rare and strange books is kidnapped, and a policewoman strays into a steampunk underworld to save her. But this is the work of Steve Aylett, not Neil Gaiman, and what sounds like a mythic exploration of storytelling is actually an unbroken string of one-liners so baffling that even Alan Moore (whose quote features on the front) sounds like he was slightly bewildered, calling it Aylett's "most relentless assault yet on our prissy synapses". The novel features a recurring tome with words that change depending upon who's reading it. The Book Lovers feels like it's pulling the same trick, and not everyone will like what they find in front of them. This is Aylett's most dense, challenging work. It's a stream of consciousness powerful enough to fill a water park, and you'll need razor focus in order not to drown. But the confusion is almost certainly the point; it all builds to a self-aware final line that seems to sum up the entire enterprise. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have a badger to wave at. Sam Ashurst

Nothing is as vicious as a satirist who’s already told you once. The Book Lovers presents itself as Aylett’s take on steampunk and New Weird, with its grotesque industrialists, surrealist descriptions of books that keep altering their plots, and a Victorianesque society where “mirror-books”— objects that allow the user to look smart while really only serving as vanity symbols and reflecting their owner back at them— are the ruling fad. Into this bright dystopia stumble a bookseller, an industrialist’s daughter who fakes her own kidnapping, an aristocratic terrorist, and an eccentric investigator who spends way too much time on aesthetics. Aylett then, with characteristic absurd humor, flips the tables not just on the book but on modern publishing, building on themes discussed in his previous works, specifically Heart of the Original and Lint. The plot—centered on books, vanity, and praxis—is pushed to its bluntest and most bombastic extremes with a gleefully bizarre sense of humor, resulting in the densest and most entertaining work of deconstructive literature produced this year. Or, at least, the funniest.

-- Sam Reader

Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city around. The majority of these sentences lay out truths so deep one wants to sit and spend an afternoon contemplating them. The writing, however, sweeps you along, crackling with electricity, megavolts on their way to illuminate heart, brain, and soul. I’m not the only one singing such high praises, the cover – and the artwork is lovely – features similar commendations from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Robin Ince. No one writes prose like Steve Aylett, or has quite such a singular worldview, ultra-cynical but way too funny to be completely despairing. His is a precision that appears out of thin air a millimeter away from its target. “‘It’ll get worse before it gets better’ – the fact that this statement is perennial should tell you something,” explains Sophie Shafto. Hugo Carpstein tells Inspector Nightjar “It’s your job to depict justice, isn’t it?” It’s that ‘depict’ that is perfect, saying so much about the surface level workings of government and its employees. As referenced above, there’s some of Aylett’s best character names too, and this is reflected in the version of 1885 London the book is set in, with locations such as Shroomsbury, Kimlico and Biccadilly. Another excellent joke I want to point out is ‘Albion holds its citizens in two cupped hands, and is sometimes so pleased it applauds.’

The setting is quite literally a steampunk world. Steam being one of the three main forces that powers industry here. The other two being voltaics and the wonderful ‘denial engine’, which the human race has most likely been running on since the dawn of time. There’s more plot here than in a typical Aylett book, though one can be forgiven, what with everything else going on, for not catching every detail. Sophie, daughter of magnate Lord Shafto, has been kidnapped and Inspector Nightjar is on the case, interrogating a cast of personalities who, whether given the chance to speak or not, spout sidesplitting bizarre complaints often only tangentially related to the topic at hand. With the book being so much about, well, books, it is tempting to look for Aylett himself behind the masks of say Hugo Carpstein or Sir Percy Valentine, and a description of the writer Emmanuel Feste describes our author to a tee – “an obscurity with a sixth sense of humour who was said to have blown ‘a swarm out of a whistle’, shouting from one horizon to the next about how morality is not altered by altitude and annoying all by demanding that his pursuers keep up.”

Sophie Shafto is a precocious youth who has sensed the importance of books from an early age. “In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life.” Books abound through the text, as they should in something called The Book Lovers, and there is a lovely bit of prescience in the fact that despite this being the late 19th century the population has become engrossed in ‘mirrored books’, complete with leather spines, held in one’s hand and gazed at all day long, an excellent dig at cell phone culture. And while these are an example of the superficiality of the masses, The Book Lovers is a testament to the power of books – in what it says about them and what it is itself.

-- Aug Stone XRay Lit Mag

Steve Aylett is an author beloved by all who read him, for the simple reason that one either joyfully consumes his books or surrenders after two pages. There is no middle ground: Aylett’s rapid-fire jokes and aphorisms spilling from the mouths of every character and of the narrator will either beguile or baffle. “Or” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence.

To be clear, I’ve loved Aylett’s books for decades (three, going on four) and The Book Lovers is a special joy in that I was able to mostly keep track of the plot. Sapiosexual anarchists scheme against warmongering industrialists by faking the kidnapping of an anarcho-heiress. But why is the population so quiescent? Because books are being replaced by bound collections of mirrors — you see yourself in every page, get it? There’s also a police inspector on the case, and maybe some books so complex that they change upon re-reading.

The Book Lovers is Aylett’s most accessible work yet. Oh no!

More review to come. But first, a selection from random pages:

“A meaning from a book may surprise us like a scorpion escaped from a paperweight.” “Giving your life to a church is like taking a bullet for a cauliflower.” “I met her publisher, a literary sawbones who once specialised in miniature ‘knuckle books’ which could be placed between the halves of a walnut and thrown at people.” His vision cleared the way bugs rush away when you lift a log. She settled in like a new grave next to him.

Maybe you had to have been there for these lines and a thousand others to land, but luckily the book is an inexpensive paperback and also very inexpensive pixels. It’s a challenge not to fall into Aylett’s cadences when thinking and typing about his books. He’s parsimonious with commas is the trick.

If there’s a genre here, it is satire in the first instance and steampunk in the second. There are dirigibles anyway, and weirdos with businesses small and large, and even a weaponized parasol, though the central theme is war versus the intellect. It’s not a mystery but is a crime novel; our protagonists are the antagonists of some book with backward writing one might spot on one’s shelf while taking a mirror selfie. (This is figurative language, not something actually in the book, but it’s damn close.) We always know a lot more than the detective figure, Nightjar, who is sort of an anti-Colombo as she gets more confused with every question she asks, not that we can blame her.

Should you buy this book? If you lack for patience, you might get more out of it via buying it for a friend and then hanging out as he or she reads you the bit that just made them giggle or raise an eyebrow. But if you’re ready to flex the bicep between the hemispheres of your brain, you can read The Book Lovers your own damn self.

-- Nick Mamatas

"...such a fertile mind, [...] Aylett has produced so many works of exceptional quality."

Steve Aylett is a satirical science fiction and slipstream author of several bizarro books.

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