New Today: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

The Kirkus review is as much as many readers will need to know. When Kirkus said that Our Tragic Universe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a “freewheeling intellectual journey with no destination,” some readers were bound to reply with excitement, others with disdain.

It is apparent that Thomas thinks. A lot. About stuff. And she thinks about a lot of stuff. And those things? They’re not necessarily connected.

This latest work, for instance, is about Nietzche, tarot, cosmology and knitting patterns. More things, too, but you get the idea. In a larger way, Our Tragic Universe is about relationships and the things that connect us, personified here by book reviewer-turned-genre-novelist Meg Carpenter and her grumpy boyfriend.

Our Tragic Universe is a whimsical book, sure it is. But it also tackles all of our big, important questions and practically no one is better suited to be asking them than Thomas, nominated for the Orange Prize (for The End of Mr. Y) and named as one of the Telegraph’s 20 best writers under 40. If you haven’t heard of her, you will. Because the future of fiction? I think it looks a lot like this.