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, whose father worked with Alan Turing, is an English schoolgirl whose encounters with Judd and Joel have extraordinary results…These characters’ search for meaning in a complex millennial world is compulsively fascinating. Woven into their story is the history of the computer, the Holocaust, and 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….’Hugely ambitious – a highly original debut’ TIBOR FISHER

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