Habitus

An epic novel of immense scope and achievement, entwining twentieth-century technology and science into the bizarrely linked lives of three characters and a space-dog in search of identity and meaning in a cacophanous universe.

Joel is a New-York born mathematical genius and Hasidic Jew. Judd is the disaffected son of a Hollywood star. Jennifer is an English schoolgirl whose father worked with Alan Turing and whose encounters with Judd and Joel have extraordinary results… These characters’ search for meaning in a complex millennial world is compulsively fascinating, and woven into their story are the history of the computer, the Holocaust, the links between numerology, mathematics and gambling.

This is an endlessly inventive, funny and moving novel which ultimately offers a philosophical vision of our relationship with the machines we create as well as with the history which created us. Meanwhile, orbiting the world in Sputnik II is the Russian space-dog Laika who has acquired self-awareness….

’Story-telling can’t be learnt: you’ve either got it or you haven’t. James Flint has it.’ LAWRENCE NORFOLK