Taking the arrest and state-enforced chemical castration of Alan Turing as its historical pressure point, Murmur goes on to invent the mathematician Alec Pryor.

Pryor isa Turing-like figure whose altered body becomes the site of an extended inquiry into consciousness, memory, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and without turning Turing’s life directly, Eaves works through journals, letters and dreams, making his biography dissolve into speculation. 

Pryor thinks through mathematics, perception, language, love and machine intelligence while undergoing a punishment designed to make his body conform to the law’s idea of normality; the book’s great tension is between that coercive simplification and the almost irreducible complexity of consciousness itself. It won the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize and Republic of Consciousness Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths and James Tait Black prizes. 

Canongate Books paperback, 2019; this Canongate edition follows the original 2018 CB Editions publication. 192pp. Good. Moderate rubbing and shelf wear to covers, with visible edge and corner wear and some light creasing; internally clean and sound.