In this stunning debut novel, English playwright Edward Carey crafts a modern Gothic tale around the crumbling "Observatory Mansions" and its reclusive, eccentric tenants. Reminiscent of Beckett, Ionesco, and Stephen Millhauser, "Observatory Mansions" is the British literary sens...

In this stunning debut novel, English playwright Edward Carey crafts a modern Gothic tale around the crumbling "Observatory Mansions" and its reclusive, eccentric tenants. Reminiscent of Beckett, Ionesco, and Stephen Millhauser, "Observatory Mansions" is the British literary sensation that John Fowles called "easily the most brilliant fiction I've read this year." Illustrations.

Once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral estate, Observatory Mansions is now a crumbling apartment complex, home to an eccentric group of misfits. One of them is Francis Orme, who earns his livelihood as a living statue. When not practicing "inner and outer stillness," Francis steals the cherished possessions of others to add to his private museum. The other tenants are equally as odd: his mother and father, who haven't interacted in years; a man who continually sweats and cries; a recluse who prefers television to reality; and a woman who behaves like a dog. When Anna Tapp arrives among them she stirs their souls, bringing long forgotten memories to the surface-and arousing fears that this new resident intends to provoke a metamorphosis.

Reminiscent of Beckett, Ionesco, and Millhauser but startlingly original, Observatory Mansions is also unexpectedly beguiling. Upon its publication in England, it was a literary sensation, and John Fowles called it "easily the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year."