An accident, a massive insurance payout, a brain injury and an obsession with memory leads to increasingly elaborate recreations of powerful memories from a man's life. His obsessive recreations increase in intensity and complexity until then spiral into the real world in surprising and weird ways. It's hard to capture the strange, complex genius of this novel - I was enraptured by it's gentle and strange beginnings and surprised and excited by the bizarre and exciting action that it grew into, all underpinned by questions about the memory and reality of the protagonist. I loved this weird and compelling gem of a novel.

Cited by Zadie Smith as one of her favourite contemporary novelists, Tom McCarthy has perfected the art of writing experimental and challenging novels that have spoken to a wide audience. 'Remainder' has rapidly become something of a cult classic. The narrator suffers a head trauma that shakes an obsessive impulse loose to recreate minute moments of his life; reaching farcical levels, such as buying a building complex to serve this purpose. Deeply weird, funny and unpredictable; a literary equivalent of the Christopher Nolan film 'Memento.'