Book of Numbers * Joshua Cohen

Hidden away from the world after an auto-fictional debut novel fails to sell, a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen is hired to ghostwrite the highly secretive autobiography of a mysterious tech billionaire - who also happens to be named Joshua Cohen - pulling the author into a dangerous maze of global surveillance and digital dominance.

The Story: Written by prominent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and critically acclaimed literary icon Joshua Cohen, this celebrated 2015 tour de force is a spectacular, mind-bending milestone in contemporary literature. The narrative steps past predictable, low-stakes commercial thriller formulas or standard corporate biographies. Instead, Cohen constructs a substantial, deeply atmospheric techno-satire that masterfully pairs traditional hardboiled ghostwriting tropes with a frantic critique of internet culture, demonstrating that our digital identities have hollowed out our offline realities and left us entirely exposed to structural corporate tracking.

The plot follows a failed novelist named Joshua Cohen who receives a lucrative, life-altering contract to act as a hidden scribe for the enigmatic Principal of Tetration: a map-defying, multi-billion dollar tech giant that behaves much like Google. The billionaire Principal, also named Joshua Cohen, wants to publish his definitive memoirs before a terminal illness takes his life. As the writer listens to the billionaire's memories, his regular routine takes a sharp turn when he discovers that Tetration's foundational code was designed alongside intelligence agencies to build a flawless global surveillance network capable of cataloging every human thought and transaction.

Rather than navigating a standard business profile, the author faces an intense, high-stakes countdown as a massive leak of Tetration's secrets drops him straight into a geopolitical crossfire. Armed with the Principal's raw confessions and a dangerous hidden manuscript, Cohen must run a complex loop through corporate boardrooms and shady digital networks to survive, turning the book in your hands into an explosive battle for artistic autonomy. Published as a premium trade hardcover by Random House, this relentlessly witty page-turner keeps the reader spellbound until its final, post-modern confrontation with the digital empire.

Perfect For: Devotees of complex postmodern metafiction, sharp corporate satires, and high-intellect literary thrillers; readers who thoroughly enjoy the layered, dense prose styles of authors like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, or Don DeLillo; and book collectors securing a clean first printing of one of the most definitive novels of the digital age.

Published 2015 by Random House.

Fiction / Literary / Metafiction / Techno-Satire / Postmodern Fiction / Corporate Noir / Tech Industry Dramas