The Weight of Numbers is a big, ambitious novel that posits a world where everything is connected but, post-faith, post-fate, all we have left to guide us is numbers. On July 21, 1969, two astronauts set foot on the moon; far below, in ravaged Mozambique, a young revolutionary is murdered by a package bomb. From these two unconnected events, Simon Ings weaves a glittering web. The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerges between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposes on the problems of the Third World, this novel sends the specters of the baby boom's liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload--with a deadly payoff. The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.
Industry Reviews
"A truly networked work of fiction ... In the corner of the literary landscape in which a few of us sit, hunting for ways to work ever exciting and dynamic thinking from the sciences into the contemporary novel, The Weight of Numbers is extremely good news. It's a dynamic, innovative, and compelling book that brings into focus some of the most interesting trends in contemporary fiction." -- James Flint
"A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page." -- Lionel Shriver
"Dazzling, admirable narrative nerve ... Ings stalks his targets with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter, until he arrives at a new heart of darkness.... As the story cuts through time its lineage emerges: from the colonial excursions of Conrad and Celine to the anthropological objectivity of J. G. Ballard; to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; to the askance mix of fact and fiction in DeLillo.... It is unlikely there will be a finer-written fiction this year." -- Chris Pettit
"Ings weaves an ingenious, shimmering web of contiguity and chance.... A feat of meticulous plotting ... Ings's project is not dissimilar from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, with which it has been compared." -- Alistair Sooke
"Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, Simon Ings's remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counterhistory, of the last sixty years. Ings's fiction is vivid and swift, a thing of scenes and people, smugglers and astronauts, spies and revolutionaries. But beyond the topical excitements lies something even grander--a vision of our culture a death ship. The Weight of Numbers is amazing." -- Mark Costello
"One of the most exciting--and relevant--books of the last year. Booker material, for sure."
