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Book Cover for: The Möbius Book, Catherine Lacey

The Möbius Book

Catherine Lacey

Reader Score

80%

80% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 18 reviews on

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Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub

Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and heartbreaking--and heart-mending--exploration of endings and beginnings.

A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith's power, and inherent danger.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Jun 17th, 2025
  • Pages: 240
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.50in - 0.90in - 0.60lb
  • EAN: 9780374615406
  • Categories: MemoirsLove & Romance

About the Author

Lacey, Catherine: - Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth." ―Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

"A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy: What remains unknown (indeed, often unknowable) at the core of the people we know best? And how do we survive this unknowing? This wry, surprising, nimble book--allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight--achieves what only great art can manage: to be both impossible to imagine, and utterly necessary. I was absolutely spellbound." ―Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters