The Möbius Book bookcover

The Möbius Book

This title will be released on:

Jun 17, 2025

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Description

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by Vulture and LitHub


A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.

Product Details

PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Publish DateJune 17, 2025
Pages240
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9780374615406
Dimensions28.2 X 1.1 X 1.0 inches | 1.0 pounds

About the Author

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Reviews

"Catherine Lacey has been climbing up the literary ladder ever since her magnificent debut novel . . . Now comes The Möbius Book, a hybrid fiction-memoir written in the wake of a brutal breakup. Lacey was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017, and rightly so – this new one runs the emotional gamut." The Telegraph

"Catherine Lacey continues to probe and puncture the membrane between what is real and what is imagined . . . curious and entirely unique." —Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"The Möbius Book has no beginning or end but stresses the cycles that punctuate our lives, musing on memory and fiction and the centrality that faith—whatever form that may take—can have. With a heavy emotional thrust and a singular style, this book might resist easy definitions or categories but asks gnawing universal questions on intimacy, security and belief systems that are sure to enthrall many." —Nathan Smith, Observer

"Is it a memoir or a novel or a little of both? Better to categorize Lacey’s latest as its own genre, a category-defining, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more . . . The Möbius Book is full of questions that cannot be fully answered. What is real? What is fake? What is love? Why does suffering exist? Unlike life, there is no beginning or end, just a story that follows its own strange, wild, and mesmerizing pattern. A sui generis work, like no other." Booklist (starred review)

"A hybrid work of fiction and nonfiction, a genre-bending work that traces her relationship with her ex partner and with her former religious faith. Lacey’s work always surprises me and offers something totally new . . . sure to be striking and singular." LitHub

"Part novel, part memoir, what might have become a mere separation narrative in another’s hands instead interrogates through its own form whether anything begins or ends in the first place." —John H. Maher, The Millions

"As a massive fan of Lacey’s ambitious alternate-history novel Biography of X, I couldn’t be more thrilled that she’s following it up with something similarly audacious: a half-fictional, half-memoiristic meditation on her own breakup. Leave it to Lacey to put a tantalizing asterisk on her first foray into autobiography. —Conner Reed, Publishers Weekly

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth." ―Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

"A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy: What remains unknown (indeed, often unknowable) at the core of the people we know best? And how do we survive this unknowing? This wry, surprising, nimble book--allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight--achieves what only great art can manage: to be both impossible to imagine, and utterly necessary. I was absolutely spellbound." ―Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

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