Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  I looked out of the window again. I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from inside like this, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever—burn out, pop, extinguish—and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there’d be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we’d just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to—

  Clémentine Deliss and Thomas Boutoux at Metronome Press, for first bringing Remainder into the public realm with the MP Paris edition of 2005; Marty Asher and the team at Vintage, for their help in preparing the current edition for publication; Jonny Pegg at Curtis Brown, for his untiring support; and Johnny Rich and Tarquin Edwards, for generously sharing their experiences of (post-)trauma with me.

  Tom McCarthy

  REMAINDER

  Tom McCarthy was born in 1969 and lives in London. He is known for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semifictitious avant-garde network. Remainder is his first novel.

  ALSO BY TOM McCARTHY

  Tintin and the Secret of Literature

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2007

  Copyright © 2005 by Tom McCarthy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France by Metronome Press, Paris, in 2005 and subsequently published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Alma Books Limited, Surrey, in 2006.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-0-307-27968-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

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