Title: The Broken World

Author: Tim Etchells

Our narrator’s life is slowly coming apart at the seams. The Pizza job looks shaky, the best friend Brainiac is getting depressed and the live-in girlfriend – Tory, the one who pays more than half the rent – is increasingly restless. Somehow, when he most needs to focus, his attentions are elsewhere. He’s writing an online guide to a computer game called The Broken World ­– an engrossing, possibly addictive, adventure that takes him from town to town in a struggle with zombies, agents, puzzles, robots and mysteries.

Before the narrator can press ‘Escape’ Tory’s packed her bags and walked, Brainiac has vanished off the face of the earth and the Pizza job has been vaporised in a single drunken phone call from his boss. Meanwhile deep in the towns of The Broken World things are getting very, very strange indeed. Marooned in the landscape of his empty apartment, amidst the bare cupboards and dirty dishes, our narrator is trying to work out solutions to problems involving life and love and happiness, not just for The Broken World, but for the real one too.

Tim Etchells’ writing is a refreshing mixture of the easy-going contemporary charm of Douglas Coupland and the depth and dark inventiveness of J.G. Ballard and David Mitchell. His first novel is at once a kind of off-beat love-story and a book about a computer game that doesn’t exist.

UK Publisher:Heinemann, Random House (World rights)

Rights: All other rights available

Schedule: UK publication July 2008

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