Voyage to the End of the Room

Oceane (conceived on a cross-Channel ferry) doesn't get out much. But then there's a lot you can do in your room. Voyage to the End of the Room is Tibor Fischer on top form - funny, provocative, foul-mouthed, ingenious, thoughtful, touching and completely original. Narrated by a woman who is equally funny, provocative, etc, on the surface it's a novel about a failed dancer turned computer-graphics designer who's been around the block but these days doesn't leave her house. At heart, though, it's a meditation on how and whether you can ever know other people, what is evil, what is reality, what is humanity - and can you fake them? Or is there a litmus test for the real thing? Reality constantly bumps up against virtual reality, as the novel pans around the globe from Brixton to the holiday island of Chuuk by way of Barcelona, the Balkans and the Humber Estuary, introducing a fantastical cast of irresistible characters and their stories - from sad whores and pseudo-travel agents in Lambeth to perfectly formed sexworkers and 'wetwork' specialists in the Club Babylon, a Spanish tower of Babel where our heroine used to work and bizarre deaths kept occurring; and from a scrupulously devious debt collector to mercenaries and other hard men in former Yugoslavia. There's a brilliant twist that jolts the whole novel into perspective, when Oceane starts getting letters from a friend who's been dead for 15 years, and is drawn into a mystery whose answer might, or might not, be found as far away as Micronesia. Voyage to the End of the Room should come with a health warning ('This book could seriously mess with your mind') - and it may very well be addictive.