A Rising of the Lights

From the Booker-shortlisted author, an audacious comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself.

Brilliant, hilarious, eccentric and beautiful. A surfacing story unlike anything I've read. I need two copies of this book. One to keep on my shelf, and a sacrificial one so I can cut out paragraphs and frame them. - Tim Minchin

The cure for loneliness causes loneliness. That's the human condition.

In a reeling world of fraudsters and hypnotists, sleep talkers and estranged twins, false alibis and second chances, Rusty Wilson is beset on all sides by mysteries. Why was his childhood decided by a throw of dice, why has his wife confessed to a lover, and why do his parents no longer wish to see him?

When Rusty loses his job to an AI system, Edwina, the mercurial friend of his youth, finds him a new role as an oracle to the young. But how can he advise anyone on what it means to be human when artificial consciousness appears within reach? If it's all just one more con, it's not clear who's scamming who. Besides, should any of it matter to Rusty, when all he wants is for those he loves to love him back?

What holds a life together when everything is coming apart?

An audacious comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself, A Rising of the Lights traces Rusty's descent - or perhaps his ascent - to the wonder of his true self.

A brilliant tragicomic howl to the moon of loneliness in our modern time. Toltz's humour and intelligence swim from the slapstick shallows to the philosophic depths with a mastery of language and storytelling to be treasured. Oh to get to read it for the first time all over again! - Andrew Sean Greer

Evelyn Waugh at his most playful, Saul Bellow at his most propulsive, Kingsley Amis at his funniest - these could all be forebears of the fabulously gifted Steve Toltz. But he is also a true original, giving rise perhaps to a new adjective, Toltzian. This new book burns through the aether, it goes its own unique way, it conflagrates and triumphs. - Sebastian Barry

A wildly imaginative, deeply hilarious and surprisingly tender story of the paths life takes when you don't take a life path. Morbid, insane, brilliant and packed with the kind of darkly funny philosophical insights that make sense of an increasingly terrifying, tech-dominated world. - Lexi Frieman, author of The Book of Ayn