Stop All the Clocks: A Novel

A Thrilling Debut that Explores the Profound Mysteries of Life in the Digital Age

Mona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI company that left her a hefty cash-out, Mona retreated to her home on Roosevelt Island, free to toss her phone into the East River and curl up with a good book, forever.

However, strange occurrences intrude on Mona's permanent vacation and thrust her back into the world. Colleagues from her former company begin to track her down and let on that there may be more to Avram Parr’s death than meets the eye. They all seem to believe that Mona possesses the crucial information about Avram that they seek, or, if not Mona, then her creation, Hildegard—an oracle-like bot that produces eerily prophetic poetry.

Stop All the Clocks is a rare literary thriller where the crux of the whodunnit isn't a person but modern life itself, where the conspiracy lies within the dark magic of digital technology—the ones and zeroes to which everyone is beholden—and the motive is the beguiling power of the words on the page.

About the Author :
Noah Kumin is the editor of the Mars Review of Books, the world's premier outsider book review, which has published seminal essays from Tao Lin, Sean Thor Conroe, and Magdalene Taylor, among others. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA in fiction from NYU, where he was advised by the late Martin Amis. He is the author of The Machine War, a philosophical history of computing. His next nonfiction work, The Mystagogues, will examine philosophical hermeticism through the lens of five mysterious twentieth-century writers.
 

Review :
"Like if Thomas Pynchon watched Girls—an elegy for our glitchy, over-connected souls. Every line hums. Noah Kumin’s debut is a wired, weird, wonderful thing that may outlive us all."—Madeline Cash, author of Earth Angel

“Kumin did the impossible: he wrote a melancholic, relentless, wry, brazenly poetic chronicle of love and death in the time of AI/techbro cholera. The mystical Mona Veigh is unforgettable—a haunted, haunting Clarice Starling for our dark, magical time."—Bruce Wagner

"Noah Kumin is a powerhouse of contemporary thinking about literary writing and Stop All the Clocks is the evidence that he can write it extremely well too. What an auspicious debut, both unusual and uncompromising." —Rick Moody, author of Garden State

“From the very first, there's a bite to Noah Kumin's Stop All the Clocks.  In equal measure, the book skewers and consecrates the world, and Mona Veigh is a character for the ages. Kumin has written a novel of the moment that also feels imperishable:  in the universality of its concerns, in its up-to-date fears, in the sheer elegance of its observations. Plus it's a page turner.”—Darin Strauss, author of The Queen of Tuesday and Half a Life

"An engrossing, chilling literary thriller in which poetry and technology clash over what it is to be human.”—Ewan Morrison, author of How to Survive Everything and For Emma

"In Stop All the Clocks, Noah Kumin creates a modern murder mystery, combining a dash of science fiction with a whiff of modernism—Neal Stephenson meets Italo Calvino. Kumin deftly uses Mona's paranoia to lead readers into a creepy high-tech whodunit that satisfies both as a mystery and a wry commentary on the claustrophobic effects of technology."—K.S. Haddock, author of Imagine My Surprise! (coming soon from Heresy Press)

"Equal parts Franzen and Le Carre, Stop All the Clocks blends literary hipness with page-turning plotting. Kumin’s respect for the powers of the classic novel are a rare treat in 2025!"—Carlos Dengler