John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body - he can hear the man's voice - and starts on an investigation into his murder.The tale takes place in Storville - a city where the citizens are readers, writers and characters of their own and others' narratives.I hadn't read the first in the series which I think I should have, as this just didn't work for me.It is apparently well reviewed by others.

In A Man of Shadows, Jeff Noon created a metafictional world where his detective hero John Nyquist needed to transgress the boundary between the cities of Dayzone and Nocturna – one of perpetual day and one of eternal night – to catch a killer. In its sequel, The Body Library, Nyquist finds himself in Storyville, where a new mystery unfolds after he kills, in self-defense, the man he was hired to follow. Like its predecessor, the world of The Body Library eschews all the figuration we expect fro...

Imagine randomly finding an abandoned looking library. You walk in and browse the books, but all the pages are blank. And then you come across a man covered in letters, a moving text, a story inked in as an ever evolving complicated tattoo. That’s how the Body Library begins and as far as beginnings go it’s definitely one of the most striking and memorable ones in recent literature. From there on it gets progressively stranger, but then again Noon is an expert in strange. Man of Shadows, the fir...

"The only sound in the library came from the pages of the books as they rustled on the shelves. All the empty pages. Among them lay a man covered in stories." In Storyville Central, the location of the Twenty-First International Festival of Words, people have gathered to share stories. "The night was liquid, flowing with words, with language itself, dissolved and shared like wine amongst the poor." Private investigator John Nyquist has been hired to follow Patrick Wellborn, and he trails him thr...

There's too much to say about this book, and not enough. Put simply: it's incredible, you should read it.The story's quite wonderful but honestly what makes it is the words...It's just so beautifully put together. This book is a tactile experience, I defy you not to pause to read snippets out loud just for the joy of feeling them take shape.

JEFF NOON IS A GOD

My brain feels like it's doing gymnastics while reading this series and it is oh so cool. The first book deconstructed time and personality and this one does the same for story telling and writing. Totally original concepts on display again and just as compelling a story as book one. The Body Library is hard to describe and like his other books just sorta needs to be experienced, in this one you can go to this city and literally become part of your own story or get lost in someone else's. And th...

Amazing read!! Noon has done it again. Tbis time not about Time but about words/writing. Its detective noir with scifi weirdness. Once again Noon takes you down "the rabbit hole" but you never want to leave. Great stuff here. I hope he continues to write more in this world.

After reading the first Nvquist novel,A Man of Shadows, I said I’d never look at time passing in the same way again. The Body Library has given me the feeling that I’ll never read a book in quite the same way again, without wondering if somewhere, in some other realm just beyond reach, things I’m reading are being affected and changed by the very fact of me reading it..The Body Library is a surreal reading experience, this time throwing our main protagonist into a city built upon words, narrativ...

The Body Library - an extraordinary novel that set my imagination on fire, a full ten hour blaze, the time it took for me to read its 380 pages. I also listened to the audio book expertly narrated by Toby Longworth. Jeff Noon has quickly become one of my all-time favorite authors. In A Man of Shadows, a morose, tough guy private detective by the name of John Nyquist hunts for a runaway teenager in the cities of Dayzone (perpetually day) and Nocturna (perpetually night) with the misty Dusklands

This had a similar feel to A Man of Shadows which makes sense since it is in the same world however detective Nyquist has moved from the city of many timelines to a city where everybody and everything is a story. He takes on a new case here. Very fun read.

To call this a simple Noir mystery is to completely miss the point. Noon has created something on a completely different level of anything I've read before. Yeah, that's right. The world of the imagination taking to the mean streets, turning meta-fiction on its head and grounding a whole world in a stinking reality where people really are the stories and stories walk the streets.This is a fantasy and a science fiction novel. Make no mistake about that. Noon is running with a fantastic idea where...

amazing but like what

A Whole New Level of NoirJeff Noon's Nyquist novels manage to marry high quality noir conventions with wildly imaginative speculative fiction in order to create compelling and immersive experiences. Noon creates alternate worlds, but not in a fantasy sense, or as mere alternatives to our reality, or even as quantum-babble folded space-time constructs. His alternative worlds are much more imaginative, loaded, and densely created than that.In the first Nyquist novel, "A Man of Shadows", detective

Book 1: 5*Book 2: 5*The most original series this side of Manifest Delusions ( Beyond Redemption, The Mirror’s Truth ) Noon is a master of twisting reality. My average rating for Noir fiction is probably below 3*'s and this series has earned two 5*'s. The books are a combination or Noir, fantasy, horror, mystery and dystopia. To try to compare them it's Coraline for adults with much more complicated characters and storylines. Coraline middle school creepy. These books are adult mind fuck creepy....

This is a second in the series of impossible cities by Noon. Since it is my favorite genre, I cannot be anything but enthusiastic. The novel is a bit to “writerly” for my taste (yes, that’s a reference to Barthes). In other words, it is a bit too full of allusions, metafiction, clever puns, and the rest of the stuff beloved of us, academics. But after all, it takes place in Storyville. What else would you expect?

Jeff Noon's new novel is a sequel of sorts to his previous book A Man of Shadows, which I reviewed here on Goodreads. It is a sequel in the sense that it involves the same detective character, John Nyquist. Both novels seem to have a mid-20th-century setting; they are set in a world without computers or mobile phones. Having left the city of Dayzone/Nocturna, where the previous book took place, Nyquist now lives in Storyville, a city of a very different sort. Both books are science-fictional noi...

Following on from A Man of Shadows, The Body Library follows detective Nyquist, as his career takes him to the surreal city of Storyville, where books are the very basis of existence. We’re sucked into a strange and sinister murder mystery that goes way beyond the norm, as fiction and reality merge in this literary film noir. With streets, buildings and parts of the city named after all manner of influential writers, this is the most unique and unusual setting you’ll find yourself exploring. Alt...

Much like the first in this series, there are a lot of interesting ideas, in this case about stories, narratives, and our relationships with them…yet it simply didn’t resonate with me at all.With both of these, I’ve felt like I should enjoy them more than I do, and keep finding passages and ideas that strike me as being intellectually and conceptually interesting. But there’s no emotional connection, and because of that, I’m simply not invested. The main character doesn’t seem to have much purpo...

Not just noir. Neo noir? Noir punk? Jeff Noon's writing is terribly hard to classify as usual. But oh so very enjoyable.The easiest correlation to make here is with The Neverending Story, only darker. Mystery, darkness, literature, word games, head games, mindf#%^ etc. The reader is once again plunged into a strange world with our protagonist John Nyquist. This time the town is Storyville which is fueled by... stories. But what happens if there is a fictional version of yourself living out a dif...