The most ambition and exciting novel yet from the Booker shortlisted author of C and Satin Island.

Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?

Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data but did she also discover a 'perfect' movement that would 'change everything'?

An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones in his search for it. And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy...

'Dazzling... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical' Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

'Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written' GQ

'A rich and fascinating exercise in observation' Independent

In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose... The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical... Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers, is light years ahead of anyone writing anywhere currently. * Neel Mukherjee *
A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth. -- Katy Guest * Guardian *
One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment... The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida and a sci-fi romp all at the same time... There is something uplifting about McCarthy's work. He makes you think, and he makes you think things you hadn't thought before. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written. -- Sam Leith * GQ *
Difficulty is...part of the pleasure of reading McCarthy... The Making of Incarnation is a novel of motion rather than emotion; imagine an even chillier JG Ballard... a rich and fascinating exercise in observation -- Charles Arrowsmith * Independent *
A Kafka for the Google Age. * Daily Telegraph - Praise for 'Satin Island' *

Tom McCarthy's work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His third novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the European Literature Prize and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.