Poetry. Set up rather like an encyclopedia, and containing urgent information about pretty much everything--from the Big Bang to the second shooter on the grassy knoll--Greg Williamson's A MOST MARVELOUS PIECE OF LUCK is a collection of sonnets unlike any other. The main character, an unnamed Everyman--a salesman, a poet, a conspiracy wonk, "the last man left alive"--a (somewhat) loveable loser, gets knocked off in the ninth line of every entry and is thereby condemned to being "old-fashioned, out of step, passe" for the duration.

Though full of science, A MOST MARVELOUS PIECE OF LUCK is anything but forbidding, and though full of dead people, and inescapably dark, it also manages, somehow, to be hilariously funny.

The award-winning author of The Silent Partner and Errors in the Script is at the top of his game in this wildly inventive, formally spectacular and hugely accomplished book.