The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts is a psychological thriller, a haunting love story and an epic quest laced with absurdist wit.

A man wakes in terror, choking for air, in the unfamiliar bedroom of an empty house. He has no memories and no sense of his own identity. The licence in his wallet tells him his name is Eric Sanderson.

Letters and parcels arrive in careful sequence, signed: the first Eric Sanderson. He accumulates a set of instructions for negotiating this unknown and obscurely dangerous life. He reads his own past...and there is Clio, who was loved - by him? - and who died. His dreams fill with the memory of loss.

Then the attacks begin. And now, armed with his survival manual and accompanied by a cat called Ian, Eric will set off to find out what it is that's trying to hunt him down and destroy him.

Steven Hall was born in Derbyshire in 1975. He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallum University. His Stories for a Phone Book appeared in New Writing 13. The Raw Shark Texts, his first novel, won the Borders Original Voices Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Steven lives in Hull, England.

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'Engrossing, delirious and perfectly wacky.' San Francisco Chronicle

'Leaves your heart pounding.' Marie Claire

'Bursts into dazzling life.' Sydney Morning Herald

'Heartfelt, lyrical, unabashedly sentimental.' Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

'Snap this one up.' Globe and Mail

'The most original reading experience of the year.' Independent

'Gripping...intelligent and inventive.' Times Literary Supplement