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F is for family. F is for fortune. F is for fraud. F is for fate.
From the internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World, here is a dazzling tragicomedy about three brothers whose father takes on the occult and both wins and loses.
Arthur is a dilettante, a wannabe writer who decides to fill an afternoon by taking his three young sons to a performance by the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. While allowing one of them to be called onto the stage and made a spectacle of, Arthur declares himself to be immune to hypnosis and a disbeliever in all magic. But the Great Lindemann knows better. He gets Arthur to tell him his deepest secrets and then tells him to make them real. That night, Arthur empties the family bank account, takes his passport, and vanishes. He's going to become a world-famous author, a master of the mystical. (F is for fake.)
But what of the boys? Martin, painfully shy, grows up to be a Catholic priest without a vocation. (F is for faith, and lack of it.) Eric becomes a financier (F is for fraud), losing touch with reality as he faces ruin, while Ivan, destined for glory as a painter, instead becomes a forger. (F is for forgery, too.) They've settled into their life choices, but when the summer of the global financial crisis dawns they're thrown together again with cataclysmic results.
Wildly funny, heartbreaking, tragic, Daniel Kehlmann's novel about truth, family, and the terrible power of fortune is a fictional triumph.
"[F] is both bizarre and bleakly humorous, a slim manifesto on the divide between people's dreams and their destinies." - Publishers Weekly
"German writer Kehlmann... takes us on a strange and enigmatic journey here. " - Kirkus
"This appealing, well-written novel by Kehlmann... realistically portrays the brothers' everyday lives as they occasionally stumble into shadowy and mysterious areas." - Library Journal
"What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real... It's a deeply writerly novel with a stout backbone of wonderful characterization. High achievement." - Ian McEwan
"Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import. He deserves to have more readers in the United States." - Jeffrey Eugenides
"F is an intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speed farce. But then, what else would you expect? Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light." - Adam Thirlwell
This information about F was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Lionstar
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.
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