"Maxwell's Demon" is a breathtakingly imaginative and intricately crafted novel that defies easy categorization. Steven Hall has created a world that is at once surreal and familiar, weaving together elements of science fiction, mystery, and literary fiction to create a truly unique reading experience.

The plot centers around the mysterious disappearance of a young girl, and the investigation that follows. But this is no ordinary investigation - as the narrative unfolds, we are taken on a mind-bending journey through parallel universes, time loops, and alternate realities, all while trying to piece together the truth behind the girl's disappearance.

What makes "Maxwell's Demon" truly stand out is its masterful use of language and imagery. Hall's prose is both poetic and precise, and he uses vivid descriptions and metaphors to bring his bizarre world to life. The characters are equally compelling, each with their own quirks and motivations that make them feel like real people.

Overall, "Maxwell's Demon" is a tour de force of literary invention that will keep you guessing until the very end. It's a novel that rewards close reading and contemplation, and one that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. Highly recommended for fans of innovative fiction and mind-bending narratives. 5/5.

Unfortunately, this story did nothing for me. I got 10% of the way through and found that I just didn't want to be reading it. Thank you for the opportunity and the ARC but life is too short and reading is too enjoyable to force myself to read something I'm not enjoying. As such, this was a DNF for me. Others may enjoy it as my opinion is subjective.

3.5 stars.

A mind-boggling journey through quantum physics and literary theory with a dash of hermeneutics and exegesis and and absolutely bonkers plot full of mystery, conspiracy and maybe-maybe not apocalypse. I love a good ergodic text so was drawn in by the textual intricacies. To be honest, these were not embedded into the narrative as well as in Hall Raw Shark Texts and they felt rather extraneous. Apart from the repeated leaf motif, which didn't add a huge amount, there was less interesting typesetting and formatting that I'd expected. It's easy pitfall for these intricate and eccentric works that they sometimes get a little bogged down and over-clever but it was still enormous fun to read.

HOW did I miss this absolutely splendid writer?? This is smart, engaging and I could hardly put down story of a writer overshadowed by his dead famous father (or is he?) And an insidious protege . I also lived the first stories of reading by his mom .. reverential about these beloved objects: . i love books and writers too and Quinn's story of piecing together a living from books, and fractured relationships just grabbed me .. I understand his earlier novel a year or so ago is as good .. but i feel like a new star is born for me .. hurrah!!

Nutty and hard to pin down but a fabulous read. Highly enjoyed it! I can't wait to reread this, I feel like I'll get more from a second read!

[Free copy kindly provided by NetGallery in return for my honest review]

A mind-bending mystery, literary, playful and incomprehensible by turns, but always intriguing and readable. Highly recommended.

Absolutely astounding, and worth every minute of the wait. Hall proves that he is, indeed, one of the great writers of his generation by pulling off an even more audacious interrogation of the power of language and writing than he achieved in his debut, THE RAW SHARK TEXTS. Thick with questions about religion and the fundamental structures of the universe, the book also manages to keep the story rooted in a single man's experience -- as outlandish as that can sometimes be (because, well, isn't that true for all of us?)
I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. I wonder if I ought to read it again, and soon.

I have conflicting feelings about Maxwell's Demon. I adored Raw Shark Texts, and perhaps this led to some overly high expectations (expectations which didn't take into account how much time had passed since Hall's first novel was released - certainly my tastes have changed a lot since then). I found the same engaging writing style in Hall's second novel, and for the first quarter or so of the book was pulled along by it, really enjoying the book.
When I got to the mid-point, however, I nearly gave up and abandoned the book entirely. I found the expository text in these sections quite hard going - I'm a very character-motivated reader, and for these sections it was difficult to get any human connection at all. The theoretical aspects of the text come at some expense for readability. The pacing as a whole seemed slightly awry as well - I felt several times as if I had reached the conclusion, and then the narrative would twist again. This isn't in itself a negative point, but these quick changes weren't always satisfying.
As I passed the difficult middle section and got towards the end of the book, however, I was gripped again - there were lots of interesting ideas, but the characters and plot felt slightly more complete too.
I'm not sure I'll re-read this multiple times the way I have with The Raw Shark Texts, but it was definitely interesting (and at times, gripping).
3.5 rounded up to 4.
Thanks to Canongate and Netgalley for the ARC.

It has been 14 years since Steven Hall's mind-bending debut, The Raw Shark Texts. A book so inventive and a joy to read, it has often popped into my head since. So to say that his follow-up has been eagerly awaited on my part is an understatement.

Our narrator is Thomas Quinn, an author who is struggling to make ends meet. The death of his father, a famous writer, has been a major blow. But he is also living in the shadow of Andrew Black, his father's protégé, whose only novel Cupid's Engine was a massive bestseller. Plus he is missing his wife Imogen, who is carrying out a science experiment in a distant country. The bills are piling up and the pressure is starting to build on Thomas. But then he a receives a mysterious letter from Black, which includes a photo of a strange dark sphere. He sees a person who looks like the main character of Cupid's Engine on the street, and hears a message from his father on his answering machine. What could it all mean?

I still don't know if I fully understand what happened in this story. After an intriguing start, the plot becomes quite chaotic. Thomas digresses into scientific theory, with entropy becoming an important theme. He begins to ponder philosophical questions and consider the power of words. The typography of the text changes into different shapes, like leaves for example. It's all very meta. For me, it was fun trying to connect the dots, but others might find it exasperating. My main criticism is that I didn't form any kind of attachment to Thomas or the other characters, so I wasn't really invested in their fate. All in all, it wasn't quite as satisfying a read as The Raw Shark Texts, but I enjoyed it all same. If you're in the mood for something a little more experimental, give this one a try.

This is a wonderful twisty little mystery with elements of religion, science and philosophy. Something really different, if a little mind-bending at times. A really good read.

Steven Hall returns with his most mind-bending novel yet and an avant-grade part fantasy part mystery-thriller. Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed novelist, he’s stuck writing short stories and audio scripts for other people’s characters. His wife, Imogen, is working on a remote island halfway around the world, and talking to her over the webcam isn’t the same. The bills are piling up, the dirty dishes are stacking in the sink, and the whole world seems to be hurtling towards entropic collapse. Then he gets a voicemail from his father, who has been dead for seven years. Thomas’s relationship with Stanley Quinn―a world-famous writer and erstwhile absent father―was always shaky, not least because Stanley always seemed to prefer his enigmatic assistant and protégé Andrew Black to his own son. Yet after Black published his first book, Cupid’s Engine, which went on to sell over a million copies, he disappeared completely. Now strange things are happening to Thomas, and he can’t help but wonder if Black is tugging at the seams of his world behind the scenes.

One of the most exhilarating genre-bending books I've encountered of late, this is a surreal, exciting and utterly original tale and a welcome and much-needed relief from the outside world at present. Hall is a masterful storyteller - he just has a way with words that allows him to talk about the most mundane and quotidian of subjects while making them sound fascinating - much like the inimitable Haruki Murakami. The prose so faultless and simply flies by, as do the pages, and the plot ponders over deep philosophical questions and the way in which we humans handle adversity and pandemonium in a way that allows us to carry on breathing, living and making sense of it all. If you enjoy off-the-wall novels with layer after layer to them much like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls and a rich, charismatic cast of characters you will likely find much to love within Maxwell's Demon. Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, this offbeat novel triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day. Highly recommended.

I received a copy of the book from Netgalley to review. Thank you for the opportunity.
An interesting idea behind this story and the writing is unusual too which takes a while to get used to. A twisting kind of story in that there is a lot of thinking and description in it without much action.
An OK read.

Fans of The Raw Shark Texts will be excited to see Steven Hall is back, and once again he's written a book that plays with language, typography, form, the very idea of the novel... you can tell he had a huge amount of fun writing it, and it's just as enjoyable to read. And damn, I love the way this guy puts a sentence together.

<i>What is the world made of, do you think, when you really look at it? Is it rocks and trees and rivers, or is it letters and emails and questions and wants? Do our questions make the universe? If it goes unobserved, does the universe even exist, or is it like a story in a book, a story that needs a reader’s eye moving over the letters to bring order and meaning, to cause the wave to collapse into a particle? Do these dark waters have to be seen and sorted by a Maxwell’s Demon, by a God dividing night from day, heaven from earth, to make a something from a nothing?</i>

The first-person narrator of Maxwell’s Demon is Thomas Quinn, in his early thirties and (in his own words) a failed author. He is son of a bibliophile mother and, a largely absent, famous war correspondent father, both now deceased:

<i>Dr Stanley Quinn was a man of letters; a man of words set and struck with firm conviction, a man who’d built himself from clattering keys and spooling ribbon– and a firm yank on his own bootstraps– to become the greatest poet, journalist and war correspondent of his generation.</i>

While Thomas’s old debut novel sunk without trace, his father’s protégé was to enjoy much greater, best selling success, with a 1000 page erudite mystery novel:

<i>Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel - Cupid’s Engine.
...
Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled, linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear. ‘ Police,’
...
No details about Andrew Black were available at the book’s publication; nobody talked to Black, nobody met Black, and that remains the case, even to this day. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, blurry author photos and doctored documents all did the rounds and were debunked and dismissed in turn.</i>

Indeed the only thing known publicly about Andrew Black is that he was under the wing of Dr Stanley Quinn. Thomas didn’t meet the author while his father was alive, but was to do so later, when Black revealed himself to Thomas as an eccentric lecturer in literature at The University of Hull (as all Blackadder fans know, second only to Cambridge as a great British university), and the two formed a bond, albeit one that could not be exactly called a friendship:<i> no, not friends, not even something adjacent to friends really, but it seemed to me that we were drawn together</i>.

Then Black vanished, failing to fulfil a mega-book deal, for which he’d been paid in advance, and leaving behind a rather embittered literary agent, Sophie,who also acts for Thomas:

<i>Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable.</i>

As Maxwell’s Demon opens, Thomas is living on his own, while his wife carries out research on the other side of the world <i>on a very remote island, where she believed that the single most important act in the entire history of humanity might have taken place.</i> He now writes professional fan-fiction, commissioned to add new books to classic TV series such as Stargate.

Then two strange things happen - Thomas receives a cryptic answerphone message (the call mysteriously untraceable and the voice message instantly erased after listening) which seems to be from his deceased father, and he receives a short, and equally cryptic, letter from Andrew Black.

My review above may be rather exposition heavy but is really just the basic set-up of the story. And the heavy exposition is rather representative of the novel, where the narrator follows Sophie’s approach, including relaying in detail various of her stories, so we for example get re-told the well-known tale of how the Nook e-reader replaced all the instances of ‘kindle’ with ‘nook’ in War and Peace.

And the narrator muses on, and discusses in some details, theological concerns such as why an ox always appears in nativity scenes, or an explanation of the thought experiment on the Second Law of Dynamics, Maxwell’s Demon, entropy being a key theme to the novel:

<i>Everyone knows this happens to old houses because they’ve seen it– uncared-for structures fall into disrepair and eventually collapse. This is common sense. Why it happens is simple: because there are countless billions of messy situations for all the things that make up the house– bricks, beams, nails, lintels, joists and all their atoms– to be in, any of which would cause it to fall down, and only a handful of neat situations where the house stays standing. This ever-increasing movement towards messiness is called entropy.</i>

This all makes for an entertaining read, although at times the detail crosses into Googledumping (I could look up the Nook/Kindle story myself if I didn’t know it) and narratorsplaining (his take on Maxwell’s Demon or the different sources of the Gospels are rather simplified and occasionally naive). Not that the author and narrator aren’t aware of this - it’s all done rather postmodern ironically (including some explicit nods to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, although rather poking fun at his books) but that doesn’t change the reading experience.

<i>To the best of my knowledge, the different elements I’m going to lay out below are correct, though I don’t pretend to be an expert and it’s possible I’ve misunderstood something along the way, although I don’t think so. Nevertheless, I’d encourage you to spend a little time jumping online and checking out my findings for yourself. I suspect, when you hear what I’ve got to say, you probably will.

I spent nearly two straight hours on the train to Hull, googling cherubim and following my searches down some very dense and strange pathways indeed. Here’s what I found ...</i>

The plot that follows gets increasingly tangled, quasi-religious, metaphysical and metafictional, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it all held together, but then perhaps that’s not really the point. The book also contains some typographical innovation (except this felt rather sub-House of Leaves and perhaps a deliberate tribute to that book) with parts of the text written in spirals and other patterns, albeit used rather sparingly and incidentally.

Overall this was a very enjoyable page-turner with some baked-in intellectual stimulation. But perhaps not as innovative or as thought-provoking as intended, feeling something of a mash-up of ground well-trodden by Eco, Knausgaard and Mulisch amongst others.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC. 3.5 stars.

Whoah, this was one hell of a novel! Books, writing, mystery. The Bible, the ox, the angel. The world, chaos, entropy. Hall imaginatively and cleverly mixes narratives in a surreal and wonderful way. Some people may find it too messy and too much of a struggle (it can be at times) but I absolutely loved it! So much fun :-).
Thank you Canongate and Netgalley for the ARC.

For those, like me, who like a deeply weird story this appears initially to be just up our street. At first, it has all the hallmarks of something unwordly or occult, but after sucking the reader in to the strangness of the events it has an oddly banal and unsatisfactory resolution. Like everybody, I like cleverness in a novel but one is left with the impression that the author has been leading the reader on and then can't quite pull off a convincing finish. The story is well written and inventive but more of an attempt should be made to create a satisfying final product.

I began this book around midnight and steamed through it by the morning - normally this is because I am overwhelmed by how amazing a book is, however, this one sits in a middle ground for me. The tone of the book is great and I found myself drawn into the narration, however, since I finished a few hours ago i'm struggling to think what was so great about it. The novel is highbrow, with discussions of entropy and time, biblical references and philosophical moments but i'm not sure this all worked together for me. This is one of those books for those of you who like their fiction to make them think, which this certainly does, but expect to come away wondering whether the journey was worth the effort.

I have been waiting a long time for a second novel from Steven Hall. I’m happy to report that fans of The Raw Shark Texts will dig this just as much. It’s playful, imaginative and oh so twisty, springing about all over the place from father-son relationships to entropy, angels and the real nature of the alphabet. There’s a strong narrative throughline alongside the philosophical enquiry and physics lessons, and I kept turning the (virtual) pages in a classic ‘one more bit before I turn out the light’ style. A very good read, and I hope his next book comes along a little quicker.

Thomas Quinn is a fairly unsuccessful writer for years intimidated by the success of his estranged and now dead father's protegee Andrew Black. His life is falling apart, red bills mount up, his wife has gone to America for a year when an intriguing letter arrives from Andrew Black. He begins to be drawn into an adventure that promises to make him a lot of money. This is a most unusual book using themes from physics, philosophy and religious writings to pose questions about the nature of reality. That doesn't stop it from being a readable and compelling story..

Sadly this book was not for me. I couldn't connect with it all and found it hard to keep reading. It was well written but it didn't grip me and I couldn't connect with the characters. At times it felt like the author was trying to be too clever and I found it unfathomable.