F

"F is for family. F is for fortune. F is for fraud. F is for fate." From the internationally acclaimed author of "Measuring the World, " here is a dazzling tragicomedy about three brothers whose father takes on the occult and both wins and loses. Arthur is a dilettante, a wannabe writer who decides to fill an afternoon by taking his three young sons to a performance by the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. While allowing one of them to be called onto the stage and made a spectacle of, Arthur declares himself to be immune to hypnosis and a disbeliever in all magic. But the Great Lindemann knows better. He gets Arthur to tell him his deepest secrets and then tells him to make them real. That night, Arthur empties the family bank account, takes his passport, and vanishes. He's going to become a world-famous author, a master of the mystical. (F is for fake.) But what of the boys? Martin, painfully shy, grows up to be a Catholic priest without a vocation. (F is for faith, and lack of it.) Eric becomes a financier (F is for fraud), losing touch with reality as he faces ruin, while Ivan, destined for glory as a painter, instead becomes a forger. (F is for forgery, too.) They've settled into their life choices, but when the summer of the global financial crisis dawns they're thrown together again with cataclysmic results. Wildly funny, heartbreaking, tragic, Daniel Kehlmann's novel about truth, family, and the terrible power of fortune is a fictional triumph. "From the Hardcover edition."

About the Author :
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the "Welt" Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. "Measuring the World" was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the greatest successes in postwar German literature.

Review :
"What a strange and beautiful novel, hovering on the misty borders of the abstract and the real. Three brilliant character studies in the brothers--religion, money and art--what else is there? The answer, Kehlmann suggests, without ever saying so, is love, and its lack is the essence of the failures of all three. But while these fates unroll in the idiom of psychological realism, there is a cooler geometry working on the reader, a painterly sense of the symmetry in human fates. It's a deeply writerly novel with a stout backbone of wonderful characterization. High achievement." --Ian McEwan "With the wizardry of a puzzle master Daniel Kehlmann permutes the narrative pieces of this Rubik's Cube of a story--involving a lost father and his three sons--into a solution that clicks into position with a deep thrill of narrative and emotional satisfaction. Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import. He deserves to have more readers in the United States." --Jeffrey Eugenides ""F" is an intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speed farce. But then, what else would you expect? Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light." --Adam Thirlwell "With the wizardry of a puzzle master Daniel Kehlmann permutes the narrative pieces of this Rubik's Cube of a story--involving a lost father and his three sons--into a solution that clicks into position with a deep thrill of narrative and emotional satisfaction. Kehlmann is one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today, and he manages all this while exploring matters of deep philosophical and intellectual import. He deserves to have more readers in the United States." --Jeffrey Eugenides ""F" is an intricate, beautiful novel in multiple disguises: a family saga, a fable, and a high-speed farce. But then, what else would you expect? Daniel Kehlmann is one of the great novelists for making giant themes seem light." --Adam Thirlwell