a novel, by Louis Armand

ISBN 978-0-9571213-7-9. Paperback. 366pp. Publication date: January 2014. Equus Press: London.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Guardian Not-the-Booker Prize

Order from Equus Press, from Bookshop.org, from Barnes and Noble, or via Print-on-Demand (paperback only); or try the Kindle edition UK / US.

What do a crashed satellite, a string of bizarre murders and a time-warp conspiracy have in common? Welcome to CAIRO, where the future’s just a game and you’re already dead. Set between New York, London, Prague, Cairo and the Australian desert, CAIRO has been described as “a vivid, dizzying and ultimately exhilarating exploration of the global nightmare… forceful and convincing and fist-pumpingly hilarious” (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown). Visit the CAIRO website!

“A genre defying anti-novel… Like communism it is the movement of vast majorities unfettered by a state!”—Stewart Home (author of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie)

“Unflinching in its portrayal of human greed.”—The Guardian

“A mind-bending underworld odyssey.”—Joe Darlington

“Hard to find this kind of fusion-lit combining highbrow sci-fi with semi-noir mystery; nearly impossible to find it done well. Hell yeah it’s a romp, but it’s a serious, time-shifting, corpse-bumping romp as Joblard the anti-hero lurches through a grungy kaleidoscope of a world.”—Vincent Farnsworth (author of Theremin)

“The book follows a disparate collection of narrators. Lawson is an Aboriginal geophysicist in central Australia, tracking meteorite debris to sell to collectors. Osborne, a lost soul in New York City, is recovering from a mental breakdown with the help of the mysterious Dr Suliman. Joblard is a former heavyweight boxer turned low-level thug, working for a pornographer with a fascination for the weird. Shinwah is an assassin from the future, tasked with hunting down anachronisms – future technology – in our present. The fifth protagonist begins the novel nameless and confused, waking in a Cairo that doesn’t yet exist, led by instinct through its decaying ruins to an uncertain destination. An apparent accident, the destruction of a previously unknown satellite, brings each of these characters into conflict with shadowy forces.”—Sky Kirkham, Australian Book Review

“A timely reminder of what fiction can do when it chases ideas, Cairo will reward those looking for a way to escape the enclosure of realism, cutting a hole in the fence so readers can wriggle out into the more interesting and dangerous terrain of the unknown.”—Jennifer Mills, Sydney Review of Books

“CAIRO… is a reflection not only of the current independent European publishing scene, but also of literature’s ability to globalize.”—Mycah McCrary, Bookslut

“Beware the savage jaw. The future is here now, and it’s gonna eat you up and shit you out like a half-digested Wozzie Burger. Louis Armand as the Swiftian prophet of the Virtual Age? CAIRO is the best psychogeographic sci-fi detective novel I’ve read. An original take on the genetically engineered, pornographic surveillance state that we are living in right now (in case you hadn’t noticed). Dark, frightening, hilarious and utterly gripping.”—Phil Shoenfelt (author of Junkie Love)

“CAIRO is downright playful… filling us in on not only the tangible space, but also its sonic properties, its perfume, truly creating in three dimensions the underbelly of the underbelly.”—Benjamin Woodard, Numéro Cinq

“Armand’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller, wordsmith, imagineer and general fiend are copiously and carnivorously on display in this wonderful, horrifying book. CAIRO is a vivid, dizzying and ultimately exhilarating exploration of the global nightmare and our big ideas about mental illness and democracy. Raw and ruthless, yet richly detailed and human, Armand takes a circular saw to the dusty corpse of western narcissism and the dread afflictions that torment and beguile the contemporary psyche. Peopled with a staggering array of the doomed, depraved and flat-out zorched, everybody’s on the last gasp and time’s running short. It’s forceful and convincing – and fist-pumpingly hilarious. Armand is a formidable, first-class writer.”—Thor Garcia (author of The News Clown, on Goodreads)

“CAIRO is a dazzling cross-genre novel, blending sci-fi, noir fiction, surrealism and satire all mixed with a smidge of Pynchon.”—Ken Nash (author of The Brain Harvest)

“Much has been written about Louis Armand’s affinities with noir fiction and cinema. His eloquence dealing with the sordid reminds one of Raymond Chandler, and in CAIRO his cinematic cuts from short chapter to short chapter containing seemingly-unrelated plots remind one of the best of film spy thrillers. But imagine the hallucinatory opening of The Mystery of Edwin Drood punctuating a whole book; imagine the fog and smoke darkening the beginning of Bleak House, the dust penetrating Our Mutual Friend darkening our whole planet. Imagine an author as familiar with the landscapes of New York, Northern Africa, London, Prague, the Australian outback as Dickens was with London, The Thames, and Rochester. Imagine the latter’s 19th-century grime become radioactive, dusting our globe. Then imagine a frustrating and destructive conspiracy like Dickens’ Chancery insinuating itself everywhere, but armed and dangerously aware of all current technologies, and characters’ lives caught up in this conspiracy they understand no better than Chancery’s victims understood their tormentor. All this comes to you, no at you, in a complex style that blends staccato phrases, short sentences, deadpan observation of amazing phenomena with apt quotations from philosophy, and with an instructive but never bothersome range of technical information. A gripping, lively, intelligent novel both rooted in tradition and absolutely current. And hip: why give up style when all the lights might go out?”—Lou Rowan (author of A Mystery’s No Problem)

“A grim and hilarious reckoning with the future and how we got there. Jonathon Swift on a crack binge channeling James Ellroy on a transnational time-warping blitz through the contemporary hallucination and these strangest of end days. Compulsive reading, relentless, unlike anything you have read but uncomfortably close to the life you’ve been living in some fractured corner of the moment.”—Michael Brennan (author of Unanimous Night)

“A dark, challenging, dystopian novel that is addictive to read. It warps the boundaries of genre, time, identity and place. It’s like being sucked into a video game where you have to figure out the rules on the go. You hit the ground running and hold on till the end with this novel. I’ve not read anything quite like it before.”—Michele Seminara (author of Everything Strange & Sacred)

“Throughout the writing is very good. The individual stories tick along well and interestingly […]. There is lots of good detail and description and each story line has its own consistent feel and atmosphere. I enjoyed reading it.”—Peter Tyers, Concatenation

“The novel itself is a new genre, a sort of horror that I believe might be called pseudoscience fiction, this one rooted in alien technology and ancient astronaut beliefs linked to ancient Egypt.”—Jim Chaffee, The Drill Press Review

“Cairo is an anachronism waiting to happen, a black hole, a black-market book, a demolition of the corporate oasis, a walk through the city of the dead. Transnational but never global, CAIRO is also what WILL happen if things go on as they are. Shinwah’s gaze meets the picture of a future more artificial and more real than you could ever imagine. A novel of ruins. The name of a place. A return to zero, the apex of all possible futures. Psycho-pharmaceutical biocapitalism is tomorrow’s news; so ours too. Cairo: a perfect encapsulation of what it means also to be living in the end times.”—A.J. Carruthers (author of The Tulip Beds)

“A terrifying and mad mix of sci-fi and international conspiracy.”—Damien Ober (author of Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America)

LINKS TO EXCERPTS PUBLISHED ONLINE

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