First things first, stay calm. Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. All he has left are journal entries recalling Clio, a perfect love now gone. As he begins to piece his memories back together, Eric finds that he is being hunted by a creature that moves in language, that swims through the currents of human interaction. With the help of his cynical cat Ian, Eric must search for the Ludovician, the force that is threatening his life, and Dr Trey Fidorus, the only man who knows the truth. Inventive, funny and extremely smart . . . I nearly fell off my chair with admiration -- AUDREY NIFFENEGGER A fast, sharp-toothed work of genius. An instant classic -- MATT HAIG A psychological thriller with shades of Memento and The Matrix and the fiction of Mark Danielewski; page-turning, playful and chilling by turns ― Guardian Very entertaining. The bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code -- MARK HADDON Clever, exciting, funny and moving ― Sunday Times A horror-dystopic-philosophical mash-up that has critics drawing comparisons to Borges ― New York Times Jaws meets Alice in Wonderland . . . An avant-garde thriller in which these devil-fish of the unconscious somehow escape the symbolic realm ― Times Literary Supplement No novel with a cat called Ian in it can fail to win a place in my heart ― Daily Telegraph A thriller with elements of sci-fi, romance and memoir . . . A cracking read . . . but it's the outrageous inventiveness that marks it out as really special ― Irish Independent A cult in the making ― Time Out Steven Hall was born in 1975. His 'Stories for a Phone Book' featured in New Writing 13 . The Raw Shark Texts is his first novel and won the Borders Original Voices Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages and film rights have been optioned by Film Four. Steven was chosen by Granta Magazine in 2013 as one of the decade's Best Young British Novelists. He lives in Hull, England.