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Synopsis
Meg Carpenter is broke, her novel years overdue. So when a pseudoscientific book promising life everlasting lands on her desk, she jumps at the chance to review it. Thus begins a labyrinthine journey featuring mysterious beasts of the moor, forest fairies, ships in bottles, and New Age theories of everything, forcing her to ask: Does anyone really want to live forever?
Smart and entrancing, Our Tragic Universe is a literary adventure story that finds connections where we didn’t know they existed, breaks down conventions that keep us from our destinies, and shows how maybe stories just might save our lives.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Ultimately, Our Tragic Universe is saved by those moments when Thomas's purposefully aimless metafiction is allowed to relax into plain leisurely fiction about a particular community of writers -- authors of scholarship and journalism, as well as fiction -- in a specific corner of coastal England, with the sensations and circumstances unique to that spot in a dense, and basically indifferent, multiverse. Ferry schedules, past-due bills, gossip at pubs about who's sleeping with whom; Moleskine notebooks and word counts and pitches to editors: the small stories Thomas lets her characters tell about themselves say a lot more, more profoundly, than all the soliloquies on storytelling and discourses about discourse.