Tom McCarthy Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Tom McCarthy is an artist and writer that was born in London in 1969. The author was raised in South London’s Greenwich and studied English at Oxford’s New College.

During the early 1990s, he spent several years in Prague, where he worked for the local Time Out as a literary editor in Amsterdam.

“Remainder” his debut novel came out in 2005 under Metronome Press. The work would go on to become a cult hit and was soon after republished by the American-based Vintage Books and Alma Books in the United Kingdom.

After it garnered a lot of critical acclaim, it went on to be translated into nearly a dozen languages, won the Believer Book Award, and was even adapted into a film.

McCarthy would then release “Tintin and the Secret of Literature,” a literary criticism work in 2006. In 2007 Alma Books published “Men in Space,” his second novel.

He has since then published numerous articles, essays, and short stories on art, philosophy, and literature.

He has also been working on a semi-fictitious avant-garde network art project about the International Necronutical Society. The work has been called one of the most comprehensive artworks in years according to “Untitled Magazine.”

McCarthy started out as a writer and since he was a child, he always dreamed of one day becoming an author. When she went to college, he studied literature rather than creative writing, since the latter was not a thing then.

Once he graduated from college, he started penning novellas and all kinds of literary works. During this time, he lived in all manner of cheap places in Berlin and Prague.

In the 1990s, it was easy to find all manner of jobs to support himself which is just what he did. At some point, he worked as a picture framer, life model, and barman, even as he wrote odd book reviews for newspapers and magazines.
In his twenties, he began making friends with visual artists who he found out had a more dynamic connection with literature as compared to writers.

His new friends were into Blanchot, Bataille, and Burroughs among many other creatives whose names he cannot pronounce. He would soon fall into the world of literary modernism and its legacy, which is how he got introduced to fiction writing.

Tom McCarthy finished writing the manuscript for “Remainder,” his debut novel in 2001. Like many authors, the work got a rejection by all manner of publishers and nobody was interested in publishing it.
Most publishers thought it was not sellable while some just did not get it, forcing Tom to put it aside as he put his time into art projects.

In 2004, Clementine Deliss the general cultural activist and curator who now works as the director of Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum offered to publish the manuscript.

Working with Thomas Boutoux the French curator, they had been responsible for publishing the likes of Beckett, Trocchi, and Nabokov when no one else would. They published “Remainder” in 2005 to critical acclaim.

Tom McCarthy’s novel “Satin Island,” introduced U, whose flight has been delayed at Turin airport. He is clicking through trivia on his computer when he finds some information on the Shroud of Turin.
He is surprised at how access to the truth is often mediated by a set of screens or veils which makes any world founded on those truths inherently weak.

U is a corporate ethnographer who has to write an all-encompassing document known as the “Great Report,” summing up our era.

But at every turn, he has a feeling of being lost in buffer zones, being overwhelmed by the mass of information and data and walking aimlessly through crowds of apparitions.

He has been seeing a woman named Madison that has recently been becoming very elusive. He has also been having a longstanding obsession with oil spills and cargo cults from the South Pacific.
He is wondering if his report might just remain an oozing and shapeless plasma when he is drawn out of his reverie by a nightmare of an apocalyptic cityscape.

In this work, the author brilliantly captures how we as humans find meaning and experience our world.

“C” by Tom McCarthy follows from “Remainder,” the critically acclaimed novel. In this work, Tom proves that he can be a very inventive and spectacular novelist.

The novel is set in England in the early years of the 20th century and tells the story of Serge Carrefax, who is the son of a man that runs an institution for deaf children and spends his free time experimenting with wireless devices.
He was raised up amid the silence and noise alongside Sophie his troubled but brilliant older sister. The two would develop an intense relationship that would last long after they both head into the larger and more troubled world.
Following a whirlwind relationship with a nurse he met at the spa, Serge works as a radio operator in World War I. However, Serge finds himself a prisoner of war in Germany after his plane is shot down but soon after escapes.
Back in London, the Empire Wireless Chain which is a shadowy organization hires him and sends him on a mission to Cairo. Everything culminates in Serge finding himself in a fateful and fitful state underneath an Egyptian tomb.
Tom McCarthy once again effortlessly writes a story with postmodern originality, psychological insight, and breadth.

Tom McCarthy’s novel “Men in Space” is a work set in Central Europe that has been fragmenting fast following the collapse of communism.

The work follows a cast of stranded astronauts, dissolute Bohemians, assassins, political refugees, deaf police agents, and football referees who are chasing a stolen icon painting from Prague to Sofia and beyond.
The melancholy orbit of the painting is reflected in the near misses and ellipses of the various characters, as they go through all kinds of metaphysical, physical, emotional, and political spaces.

What emerges is a vision of the world as it disintegrates and humanity as it is adrift in time. While it has been hailed as a brilliant work of literary fiction, the novel comes with the guts and gusto of genre writing.