Tom McCarthy has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Price twice, once for C, the second time this year, for this novel.
The narrated, known only as U., a 'corporate anthropologist' for the Company, apparently an elite consultancy based in London, who have just won a contract on the Koob-Sassen Project, apparently a giant, epoch-defining project. I use these 'apparently's deliberately, as we never really find out what the Project is, or what kind of consultancy the Company do.
The narrator is clearly brilliant, but unmotivated; a drifty kind of procrastinator, who has serial obsessions with everything from oil spills, traffic jams in African cities, to Vanuatuan cargo cults. The book reads like a cross between William Gibson, Don de Lillo and Nicholson Baker. Nothing actually happens, at least not on the page; quite a lot is suggested, hinted at, implied. It's a frustrating book, but a pleasurable one, made pleasurable by the quality of the writing, the dark humour, the socio-political commentary on our times. A very zeitgeist-y novel.