Tom McCarthy Books in Order

Tom McCarthy was born in London in 1969 and grew up in Greenwich, south London. He studied English literature at New College, Oxford, where his reading in literature, theory, and philosophy helped set the terms for the work that followed.

In the early 1990s, McCarthy spent time in Prague before moving to Amsterdam, where he worked as literary editor for the local edition of Time Out. Those years gave him a close view of cities in transition, full of temporary communities, artists, expatriates, and people trying to make a life amid political change. Prague later became important to Men in Space.

He also found a home in the visual-art world.

In 1999, McCarthy and philosopher Simon Critchley began the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictional avant-garde network for which McCarthy became general secretary. Its manifestos, events, and art projects gave him another way to explore systems, ritual, death, technology, and the strange stories people build around them. That mix of fiction, performance, and intellectual mischief still sits near the edges of his novels.

His debut, Remainder, first appeared in 2005 through a Paris art publisher. It centers on an unnamed man who survives a severe accident, receives a large settlement, and uses the money to recreate fragments of experience with obsessive precision. The novel was later widely republished, won the Believer Book Award, and was adapted for film.

The central question is simple and unsettling: can something carefully staged ever feel real?

McCarthy followed it with Men in Space, a many-character novel set in Central Europe after the fall of communism. A stolen icon moves through Prague, Sofia, and other places, while refugees, artists, police, and drifters move around it. Readers who like the book's restlessness often respond to the way it treats history as something unfinished, personal, and hard to hold still.

His next novel, C, moves to the early twentieth century. Serge Carrefax grows up around wireless experiments and a school for deaf children, then passes through war, imprisonment, and Egypt. Communication, noise, codes, machines, and bodies all matter here. C was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it shows how McCarthy can build a big historical story without giving up his interest in gaps, signals, and things that don't quite connect.

Satin Island takes those concerns into the present. Its narrator, U., is a corporate anthropologist trying to write an all-encompassing report about modern life while drowning in data, theories, and odd recurring images. In The Making of Incarnation, McCarthy turns to motion capture, industrial efficiency, film, and a search through the papers of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth. His nonfiction study Tintin and the Secret of Literature brings the same close attention to codes, secrets, imposture, and hidden patterns to Hergé's comics.

McCarthy's books are often about people who want to reach reality through systems, records, reenactments, and technology, only to find the system getting stranger around them. He lives in Berlin and continues to work across fiction, essays, and art.