The Society of Others: A Novel - Softcover

"Hovers between the wisecracking observational realism of Salinger and the parable dream space of Kafka. . . . A paean to humanism and perhaps faith." -Salon

"One part spy novel, one part mystical fable. . . . Forges a provocative amalgam of the
humane and the homicidal." -San Diego Tribune

"Both a joy to read and intellectually challenging." -The Baltimore Sun

"A smart, engrossing allegorical taleÉa dystopic fable for the twenty-first
century." -Montreal Gazette

"This is a novel I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote for envy. It is exciting, funny, wise, and beautifully written."
--Piers Paul Read, author of Alive

"This extraordinary book, a sort of wild combination of Kafka and The Catcher in the Rye, whirls with its catatonically dysfunctional hero into a maelstrom of violence and danger to learn from oppressed strangers what really matters in a human life, and to face the most terrifying of interrogators, the self. The reader will not escape unchanged."
--Jill Paton Walsh

"It's a challenge as well as a pleasure, but The Society of Others is a novel that demands attention. William Nicholson is someone we are going to hear a good deal more about."
--Peter Stanford, author of Heaven: A Guide to the Undiscovered Country

"It is thrilling in every sense, but it is also hypnotic, fast-moving, and intellectually challenging, as it twists and turns, leaving you confused, uncertain, even uncomfortable, and yet utterly hooked. A philosophical master class, it is quite staggeringly good."
--Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

A young man embarks on an aimless journey, hitchhiking across Europe without planned destinations, only to find himself caught up in a confusing, threatening, and surreal world of inexplicable violence and dark secrets. A first novel. By the playwright author of The Retreat from Moscow. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.