In this inventive and affecting novel, an octogenarian book collector named Mr. Mee discovers the Internet with life-changing results.Told in turns from the point of view of the endearing, utterly guileless Mr. Mee, two eighteenth-century French philosophers, and a middle-aged university professor, Andrew Crumey's book concerns the creation and mysterious disappearance of Rosier's Encyclopedia, a potentially explosive text written more than 200 years ago that purportedly disproves the existence of the universe. When Mr. Mee comes across a reference to the Xanthics, an obsolete sect that maintained unorthodox beliefs about fire, his hunt for more information compels him to try locating a copy of the singular encyclopedia. Technologically ignorant, Mr. Mee is at last persuaded by his addled housekeeper to conduct a modern search for the book on the Internet.But instead of finding additional clues about Rosier's Encyclopedia, Mr. Mee stumbles upon an image of a naked woman reading from an intriguing text......Alternating among the three stories, Andrew Crumey takes us closer to the truth about Rosier's Encyclopedia and the secrets it contains. At times funny, often thought-provoking, and utterly engaging, Mr. Mee is Crumey's most rewarding novel to date.AUTHORBIO: Andrew Crumey is the author of three previous novels, Music, In a Foreign Language, which won Scotland's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel, Pfitz, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and D'Alembert's Principle. He lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Musing on Rousseau, the French encyclopedists and the vagaries of chance and identity, Crumey (Pfitz; D'Alembert's Principle) has written another novel of ideas in the grand tradition of Calvino, Borges and Kundera. This delightful romp around the knottiest concerns raised by Enlightenment philosophers and postmodernists alike centers on the long-vanished Rosier's Encyclopaedia, a 200-year-old French text that may challenge the existence of the universe. Setting out to track down Rosier's work, dotty old Mr. Mee, a reclusive British book collector, embarks on a quest that introduces him to the Internet in all its seamy variety (he finds an unclad woman reading a Rosier-related text on one site) and brings on the attentions of a "life scientist" named Catriona, who introduces him to the pleasures of the flesh. Mee's narrative alternates with that of a Dr. Petrie, a professor of French literature desperately in love with one of his students, and Ferrand and Minard, the bumbling 18th-century French copyists charged with reproducing Rosier's original manuscript. Mee may be the most endearing narrator, and Ferrand and Minard the most haplessly slapstick, but Petrie proves the most perceptive, lacing his lovelorn lamentations with reflections on Proust and Flaubert. Crumey also provides tantalizing glimpses of the Encyclopaedia itself, its treatises all absurdly outdated and yet provocatively applicable to modern-day computer science and physics. The novel isn't perfectDits philosophical asides can be hard going, and it's easy to lose patience with the exaggerated ineptitude of all its narratorsDbut Crumey's light treatment of hefty material should win the minds, if not the hearts, of his readers. (Mar.) Forecast: Crumey has yet to achieve the name recognition of Umberto Eco or even Arturo Prez-Reverte, but this strong effort and the many glowing reviews it's bound to receive should attract a few more readers to him. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

In what has become his trademark narrative style, British novelist Crumey (Pfitz, D'Alembert's Principle) offers readers three ongoing stories loosely intertwined on a philosophical spool. The title character is an elderly and incredibly sheltered scholar who, in the course of the volume, learns about both computers and the female anatomy. The other two tales involve a pair of ne'er-do-well 18th-century French copyists who come a cropper of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as a contemporary philosophy professor with a penchant for a young female student. While each of these stories is moderately clever, none of the male characters is sympathetic, and the female characters have frustratingly brief walk-ons that promise more intellectual stimulation than they are allowed to deliver. The three tales are drawn together in a messy denouement that is neither engaging nor insightful. While there are a few standout passages along the wayÄincluding the scene in which Mr. Mee describes his initial introduction to the InternetÄthere is little to recommend this to any audience.ÄFrancisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information