Tom McCarthy

"When we first meet U., the narrator of SATIN ISLAND, he is sitting in the airport at Turin, caught in a delay caused by a rogue airplane. Like everyone else in the waiting area, he is sifting through airport pages on his laptop, and then through news sites, social pages, corridors of trivia...until he happens to stumble on information about an image on a famous shroud in Turin. The image itself isn't even visible on the shroud; it only emerged when some amateur photographer looked at the negative of a shot he'd taken and saw the figure--Christ's body supine after crucifixion. Only in the negative: the negative became a positive. A few decades later when the shroud was radiocarbon dated, it turned out to come from no later than the mid-thirteenth century. But that didn't trouble the believers. Things like that never do. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the Great Report. Yet at every turn, U. finds himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in a buffer zone and wandering through a crowd of apparitions. Meanwhile, Madison, the woman he is seeing, becomes increasingly elusive, much like the particulars in the case of the recent, highly-publicized parachutist's death, with which U. is obsessed. He also develops a perverse interest in oil spills, spending great amounts of time watching loops of clean up videos. As U. begins to wonder if perhaps the Great Report will remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are reawakened by an ominous dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. SATIN ISLAND is a novel that captures the way we experience the world today, our efforts to find meaning, to stay awake, and discern the narratives we think of as our lives"--