Publisher, Canongate U.S. (April 2008)

2007 Borders Original Voices Fiction Winner

An Amazon Editors' Top 100 Books Pick

A Book Sense Selection

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

The New York Times Magazine placed Hall alongside novelist Joe Hill as a founder of the emerging “slipstream” genre, a unique combination “of science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery, and realism” and called the novel “a horrordystopic- philosophical mash-up that has critics drawing comparisons to Borges, The Matrix and Jaws.” And the Los Angeles Times named Philip K. Dick, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami among Hall’s literary ancestors, adding that his writing “is sharp and clear, which is extremely important when you are writing on the edge of the form.”

“What can you say about a first novel that’s been sold to 32 countries, was pushed by authors as diverse as Mark Z. Danielewski and Chuck Palahniuk, and received front-page coverage in the New York Times business section? Hall is such a hit that the publisher won’t even reveal what he’s up to next.” –Library Journal

“Where Raymond Chandler's rule for making the reader keep turning the pages was: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand," the postmodern thriller-writer's should be "When in doubt, bung in a picture of a shark made from clumps of text" because, by gum, it works.”—Jake Kerridge, The Daily Telegraph "What is summer without some sharks? The Raw Shark Texts is an elliptical tale of lost memory and concomitant mystery…Amazingly complex, The Raw Shark Texts is part Mary Shelley, part Sigmund Freud, part thriller, part Hegelian dialectic and totally engaging.”—The Baltimore Sun “The Raw Shark Texts is an intelligent, inventive (typographically as well as imaginatively) first novel that combines a rattling good sci-fi thriller with a submerged but unsettling account of psychological disintegration through grief.” —Tina Turnbull, The Scotsman

“If Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami collaborated on Moby-Dick crossed with The Wizard of Oz, they might produce something like Hall’s deliriously ambitious debut. . . . Riveting . . . A narrative feat of hallucinatory imagination.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wonderfully ambitious, even exuberantly so. At times, it seems as if Hall must have written it while hopping up and down with excitement, like a 6-year-old recounting his first trip to the circus. Paced like a thriller, the book thinks like a French theorist and reads like a deluge. The end result is a fun, quirky, very British love story. . . . Herman Melville meets Michael Crichton, or Thomas Pynchon meets Douglas Adams. No matter, the book is full of big, wild ideas brought to gloriously convoluted fruition. . . . Wonderfully imagined . . . [Hall is] a natural storyteller, and for a yarn this big and this beautifully convoluted, that’s what’s most important. He has written an engrossing, delirious and perfectly wacky book.” —Tobin O’Donnell, San Francisco Chronicle

“The Raw Shark Texts is so much more than a clever, playful book, though it is both those things. Steven Hall has worked hard to build on the work of his intellectual ancestors. . . . Paul Auster, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Steve Erickson, Ursula K. Le Guin — to say nothing of Beckett and Borges and Kafka. . . . His writing, description as well as dialogue, is sharp and clear, which is extremely important when you are writing on the edge of the form.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“An avant-garde thriller in which these devil-fish of the unconscious somehow escape the symbolic realm, or rather, we join them on their side of the border. . . . Ian is a splendid character: a self-important misanthropist, invariably with ‘thundery disgust and disappointment all over his big flat ginger face.’ . . . The novel’s great virtue is its structure. . . . Information is released in pieces, like time-release drugs in a capsule, their order derived from the progressive revelation of truths rather than the forward march of events. . . . The Raw Shark Texts unfolds not in sleek cyberspace, but inside the post-Freudian human self, with its layers, its pungent humours, its debris left over from construction, and its monsters of the deep. . . . Jaws meets Alice in Wonderland.” —Sarah Bakewell, Times Literary Supplement (London)

A national best seller, The Raw Shark Texts was described by The New York Times Magazine as indicative of an exciting emerging literary genre and the San Francisco Chronicle raved that it’s “paced like a thriller . . . and reads like a deluge.”

“Every so often, a work of imaginative fiction arrives—such as Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 or Stephenson’s Snow Crash in 1992—that shakes things up and opens up a new universe of possibilities. The Raw Shark Texts is one of these books.” —Blogcritics.com

Steven Hall’s kaleidoscopic best-selling debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts, burst upon the literary scene gathering media attention, bookseller praise, critical accolades, and a following all over the world (rights were sold in thirty-two countries, to be exact). It has also gathered steam in the online world where it remains a topic of great passion and debate in the blogosphere and on sites such as Chuck Palahniuk’s fansite “The Cult” and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves forum.

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognize, unable to remember who he is. All he has left are journal entries recalling Clio, a perfect love who died under mysterious circumstances, and a house that may contain the secrets to Eric’s prior life.

Along with his cynical cat, Ian, Eric embarks on a thrilling, mind-bending journey in search of something called the Ludovician, an unexplainable force that threatens to consume him. With the help of allies found on the fringes of society, Eric’s climactic fight for survival makes for edge-of-your-seat fiction. The novel continues to reverberate with readers around the globe.

The New York Times Magazine placed Hall alongside novelist Joe Hill as a founder of the emerging “slipstream” genre, a unique combination “of science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery, and realism” and called the novel “a horrordystopic- philosophical mash-up that has critics drawing comparisons to Borges, The Matrix and Jaws.” And the Los Angeles Times named Philip K. Dick, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami among Hall’s literary ancestors, adding that his writing “is sharp and clear, which is extremely important when you are writing on the edge of the form.”

About the Author: Steven Hall was born in 1975. After completing a fine arts degree, he became one of the founding members of Manchester's WetNana and has produced a number of plays, music videos, conceptual art pieces and short stories. He lives in Hull. His "Stories for a Phone Book" was featured in New Writing 13 (Picador). Hall's follow-up to The Raw Shark Texts, to be published in 2010, is being kept closely under wraps.