The Manual of Detection

By Jedediah Berry

Book Overview

"This debut novel weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka." --The New Yorker

Reminiscent of imaginative fiction from Jorge Luis Borges to Jasper Fforde yet dazzlingly original, The Manual of Detection marks the debut of a prodigious young talent.

Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious detective agency located in an unnamed city always slick with rain. When Travis Sivart, the agency's most illustrious detective, is murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted and must embark on an utterly bizarre quest for the missing investigator that leads him into the darkest corners of his soaking, somnolent city.

What ensues is a noir fantasy of exquisite craftsmanship, as taut as it is mind-blowing, that draws readers into a dream world that will change what they think about how they think.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143116517
• ISBN13: 9780143116516
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Dashiell Hammett meets Terry Gilliam

The Manual of Detection reads like the love-child of Dashiell Hammett and Terry Gilliam. First time novelist Jedediah Berry stirs all the tropes of a hard-boiled detective story with surrealistic fantasy elements to create a delightfully eccentric concoction that goes down easy despite the serious message at its core. Anyone familiar with the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin,"Those who would give up essential...

" 'It may be a crime / But I'm sure that you're mine / In my dream of your dream of me.' "

In the cloudy, rainy, anonymous metropolis of Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection, dream spies (oneiric detectives), dream crimes, and dream dreams busily deconstruct the very existence of its strange, stiff, somnambulistic residents. Are they real people being manipulated? Are they just figments of a larger dream? When they "wake up," do they really wake up, or do they just think they do? Berry's meek, unambitious...

A Surreal and Brilliantly Written Debut Novel

For Charles Unwin, the reluctant hero in Jedediah Berry's eloquent and surreal first novel, The Manual of Detection, time is curiously stretched beyond recognition and dreams are labyrinthine and vulnerable to devious invasion. Mysterious femme fatales, surly criminals and singing somnambulants lurk around every corner, each offering more bizarre clues for Unwin who is trying to solve the murder of a famous detective so he...

a dreamcrossed twilight

This novel reminds me a lot of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil: a lowly clerk suddenly finds his world turned upside-down. A rather humdrum life has become a nightmare where nothing is as it seems: somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, between reality and something you know is a dream, a trip on LSD. Unwin is a clerk--one of many in a huge room--on the 14th floor of the Agency. On the 29th floor is the person he clerks...

From the first few lines of this novel I found myself completely...

From the first few lines of this novel I found myself completely enraptured by the provocative imagery provided. From the sopping wet rain that as the story goes on you swear you begin to feel in your own socks, to the hats and bicycles you wish were still common place, this book puts you easily into a city as gloomy and foggy as it is beautiful. With such a wonderfully detailed setting, you would almost expect the plot...