John Fowles’s Mantissa is a compact, combative metafiction staged inside the mind of a writer.

Miles Green wakes in a hospital room without memory and is confronted by a woman who repeatedly changes identity: nurse, muse, lover, critic, character. First published in 1982, the novel turns the old figure of the female muse into a hostile theatrical device. Fowles is interested in authorship, desire and the vanity of artistic control, but the book’s sexual politics are conspicuously dated: its intellectual game repeatedly depends upon the woman’s body becoming material for the male writer’s argument. That limitation is also part of what makes it revealing—a period specimen of postmodern fiction testing its own authority while remaining less capable of escaping it than it imagines. For readers interested in metafiction, literary self-parody and books that make composition itself the battleground.

Triad/Granada, 1983 special overseas paperback edition. Cover rubbing, edge wear and light creasing; pages age-toned.