"Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation."--Guardian
A blistering, brilliant novel from the Booker-shortlisted author, elegantly reflecting his Geoffrey Faber Memorial award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self's unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical "state-of-an-era novel," Self's target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability. His middle-class, middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors as the novel progresses, until one day someone says something to the effect of, "This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen." The Quantity Theory of Morality finally solves the equation of time and money that dominates our lives, in a way that is simultaneously deranging, destabilizing, and hilarious.
With recurring--if defeated--appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or "Proposition" shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. With The Quantity Theory of Morality, Self provides the sequel to his award-winning debut of 34 years ago: The Quantity Theory of Insanity. That literary psycho-surgery proved there wasn't enough sanity go around--now he's established what many of us fear to be the absolute truth: there isn't enough good to go around, either.
About the Author :
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including most recently Elaine, from Grove Press in 2024; Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London. will-self.com
Review :
Praise for The Quantity Theory of Morality:
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
"A raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire . . . More even than Martin Amis, Self reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic . . . An excoriating vision of moral decline."--The Guardian (UK)
"A coruscating satire about a group of metropolitan sophisticates trapped in an endless round of infidelity and self-loathing . . . At the heart of The Quantity Theory of Morality is a lamentation about our collective ethical compass gone askew."--The Telegraph (UK)
"An excoriating satire of the English middle class and the Anglo-European liberal elite that's centered on a group of incestuous middle-aged London friends . . . The idiosyncratic book has an unorthodox structure and hallucinatory feel . . . There's never a dull moment in a Will Self book."--Elaine Szewczyk, Publishers Weekly
"A black satire of bad behavior . . . his eye for human foibles and their consequences are sharp . . . A potent feat of provocation."--Kirkus Reviews
"The vitriol is strong in Self's devilish latest . . . Self's caustic style is on full display, particularly with Zack Busner's entertainingly misanthropic philosophizing."--Publishers Weekly
Praise for Will Self:
"Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers."--New York
"Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel."--Guardian
"Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all."--New York Times
"Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book."--New Yorker
"Self's prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole."--Independent
"Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self's unrestricted writing . . . You'll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled--and laugh your ass off."--NPR
"Will Self's Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief."--New Statesman
"Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion."--New York Review of Books
