After losing his job and receiving an alarming diagnosis involving his hypotenuse, Kleinzeit enters a hospital where illness, language and the London Underground begin behaving like conscious beings.

He falls for Sister, writes on mysteriously insistent yellow paper, and drifts through a world in which objects speak, abstractions develop motives, and the boundary between bodily crisis and metaphysical revelation becomes increasingly useless.

First published in 1974, Hoban’s second adult novel is comic, compressed and gloriously unstable. Its short, rhythmic chapters make the strangeness feel less like decorative surrealism than a new operating system for consciousness. For readers of Beckett, Vonnegut, early Pynchon or novels that allow language itself to become a character. 

Picador, 1976. Paperback with rubbing, creasing and edgewear; pages age-toned, binding sound.