Breaking up, breaking down

Franklin Nelson
01 August 2025, The Tablet

Catherine Lacey

macmillan, Willy Somma

The Möbius Book CATHERINE LACEY (GRANTA, 240 PP, £16.99) tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Blue runs into purple runs into pink, or the other way around, depending on how one holds Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book. The spectrum of colour is meant to mirror the instability of her seventh book, “a hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending”. The American author is no stranger to playing with boundaries, having invented a protagonist and a fictional biographer in Biography of X. But where that novel, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize last year, homed in on other lives, here the focus is the author herself.

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