Fame

At the relatively young age of 35, Daniel Kehlmann is the enfant terrible of European literature, adored by critics as much as by booksellers. Fame is his sixth novel, and after the epic reach of his bestseller Measuring the World, it's a lean, mean book with not a word wasted; but all Kehlmann's verbal and philosophical pyrotechnics are on full and spectacular view.

Through nine interlinked stories, Kehlmann conjures the global grid of communication, the ways in which we're all linked by strands of technology, communications, culture and travel - and then shows how easy it is to fall off the that grid, to disappear from the map in thrilling and terrifying ways. A thinly-disguised Brazilian feelgood writer sits in his Rio penthouse with a gun in his mouth; an old woman begs the author to unwrite her impending death and let her be young again; a minor technological hitch leads to a famous actor and an uncharismatic office drone beginning to exchange identities. Acerbic, laugh-out-loud funny, inherently ridiculous and deadly serious all at the same time, these stories sketch out a world in which everything is more precarious than we like to think it is. As wise as it is hilarious, Fame is a gloriously twisted handbook to modern life.