Set in the strange landscapes of the 2030s, this gloriously plotted and darkly funny literary thriller sees a troubled conservationist and a disreputable mining executive team up to investigate a vile attack on the biobanks preserving remnants of species dying of extinction.
Sunday Times Science Fiction Novel of the Year 2022
The dazzling new novel by the Man Booker-longlisted, Granta Best of Young British novelist, Ned Beauman - a speculative literary thriller for the age of Extinction Rebellion that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is serious in its message.
The near future. With tens of thousands of species dying out every year, our last hope is the biobanks, impregnable vaults where their remnants can be preserved forever. Until one day an audacious cyberattack obliterates every single one.
In the aftermath, a troubled conservationist and a crooked mining exec must team up in search of the venomous lumpsucker, a lost fish that they both desperately need to save. Together, they pursue it through the weird landscapes of the 2030s - a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the Baltic Sea; the dangerous hinterlands of a totalitarian state. And the further they go, the deeper they're drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9781473613553
Number of pages: 304
Weight: 514 g
Dimensions: 236 x 160 x 32 mm
A comic caper about our insanely decadent world careering through ecocide, Venomous Lumpsucker is bracingly, excoriatingly funny on our idiocy and the unquantifiable loss that we enable. It's also savagely, forensically serious on the reality of mass species loss, as illuminating as it is entertaining. It reads like P. G. Wodehouse crashing into Philip K. Dick, with a touch of Iain M. Banks. Of course, it's smart and timely, but the writing is often very beautiful, and the ideas and their implications vertiginous. - Martin Macinnes, author of INFINITE GROUND
Venomous Lumpsucker makes the death of the natural world way more fun than it should be. This is a hilarious, terrifying novel in which Ned Beauman captures brilliantly the contradictory blend of urgency, paralysis, panic and resignation the climate emergency and its attendant mass extinctions inspire. The book left me hoping - but doubting - that Beauman is a lot less prescient than funny. - Chris Power
Ned Beauman is a speculative genius, and Venomous Lumpsucker is an incredible invention. Like a ravenous creature, this book eats up all the great existential crises of the present moment and spits out an insane, hilarious, terrifying future that I, for one, completely believe will come true. Most of all, Beauman grapples head-on with that world-sized heartbreak of species extinction unsparingly and bravely. This book holds all the great pleasures of the best science fiction-novely, hyperbole, technical prowess-but with unusual humor and sensitivity to what it feels to live in this moment. Beauman could not be a more versatile writer. I will read anything he writes. - Elvia Wilk
Wildly funny and inventive. A suitably Swiftian satire for the extinction age. - Jake Arnott
A wild, absurdist quest; a wild satire of our absurd times. Seriously funny, playfully philosophical: a brilliant novel about nothing less than the future (or otherwise) of humanity. I loved it. - Joanna Kavenna
An endlessly inventive, witty and bleak literary thriller set in the not-so-distant future, when environmental collapse has wrecked much of our ecosystem. Running the gamut from strange culinary practices to shady corporate dealing, it'll make you laugh and make you think. - Stephen Bush, Financial Times, Best books for summer
You might be forgiven for thinking that a novel about impending ecological disaster and mass extinction won't be a barrel of laughs. Yet that combination is exactly what Ned Beauman serves up in Venomous Lumpsucker . . . the novel is as intelligent as it is funny. - Sunday Times
A novel that is both funny and profound, full of extraordinary ideas and brilliant set pieces, but also generous and poignant . . . Venomous Lumpsucker was worth waiting for: a novel that delights, dazzles and moves in equal measure. - Alex Preston, Financial Times
[Beauman] has always had the curious knack of wrongfooting his readers with a beating heart where one has expected only cleverness . . . Beauman is able to push his fantastic conceits just that one uncomfortable step further . . . the ideas themselves are powerful, and earn their keep within the fictional frame - Nikhil Krishnan, Daily Telegraph
Brutally satirical and grimly hilarious - Daily Mail
Fascinating . . . An astute, whimsical send-up of the logic of contemporary capitalism, in which more and more elaborate technology is invented to counteract the very disasters that technology has spawned . . . Beauman has an enviable talent for crafting sentences, and an offbeat mind when it comes to analogies and metaphors. - i
Beauman writes beautifully on the level of the sentence... Beauman's world-building is impeccable, the narrative voice (part Douglas Adams, part Thomas Pynchon, part Jonathan Swift) is often appealing. - Literary Review
An offbeat, high-wire satire of environmental capitalism and big tech - Daily Mail
Full of fun and big ideas, [Beauman's] conceptually tricksy novels crackle with comic zip, alive to the past as well as the present . . . His mischievous intelligence can be felt everywhere - Observer
Exhilarating . . . the novels do not just have propulsive plotting but the ideas are high-octane as well . . . It could not be more timely. Yet every page has a turn of phrase, a witticism, a wry observation or smart simile that beguiles the reader into taking the serious material seriously. - Stuart Kelly, Spectator
A laugh-out-loud novel about mass extinction (yes, really) . . . this novel is well-paced and warm-hearted, culminating in an ambitious and memorable ending - Books of the Year, Sunday Times
Enormously pleasurable . . . a near-faultless technical performance . . . Beauman is a master of English prose, a highly self-conscious creator of sophisticated entertainments who almost never makes a false move on the page . . . It's Beauman's best book yet - and that's saying something - Kevin Power, Guardian
Scabrously funny and satirical - Jamie Buxton, Books of the Year, Daily Mail
Confirms his reputation as one of the foremost satirists of his generation - Simon Ings, The Times
Venomous Lumpsucker has a utopian future of sorts, but we hardly notice it. In this novel by Ned Beauman, the human species is on trial; the prosecution is at once clinically precise and distractingly funny - New York Times
A madcap adventure story set in a dystopian world ravaged by climate change - Variety
Beauman is a lively writer with a knack for sharp descriptive language . . . But it's passing observations that futurists will really enjoy, like drugs to kill one's pleasure in food, or facial recognition software for tracking the spread of a cattle plague . . . it's these little things that make Venomous Lumpsucker a special pleasure - Toronto Star
Beauman's dark comedic writing tears apart the carbon offset industry, while using sharp storytelling to make big climate ideas easy to digest - Wired Magazine
Screamingly, bleakly funny . . . Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humour borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a gut-punching satire of the failure of the carbon offset project: unfortunately, it's the beach read we deserve. Fortunately, it's a savagely entertaining one - Chicago Review of Books
A sharp-edged, high-tech, globe-spanning, deeply speculative tale of the near future . . . filled with brilliant characters ranging from the most venal to the most noble. The book is exciting, unpredictable, and thick with ideas; yet at the same time meditative, fated, and simple as a Zen koan - Locus Magazine
The Venomous Lumpsucker is a type of endangered fish one of many in the near future this novel is placed in where in the face of ecological collapse humanity has capitalised on the conservation of species creating a... More
Thank you to Sceptre for the proof copy.
Was intrigued by the title of the book and the blurb.Initially it was about saving the fish in the title but it quite quickly turned into a statement into of all the species...
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Thank you so much for the advance copy. I am a huge fan of snarky storytelling and this book is entirely my kind of tone. Environmentally-charged books can be daunting and there is definitely a ribbon of political... More
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