The Möbius Book - Hardcover

by Catherine Lacey (Author)

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub

Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and painfully true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. But through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, she charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and a heartbreaking--and heart-mending--exploration of endings and beginnings.

A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith's power, and inherent danger.

Author Biography

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short-story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and a residency at the Jan Michalski Foundation. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.