Molloy

Molloy is an old man lying in his room, writing. Moran is a detective sent to find Molloy — a man who may or may not exist, by an agency whose nature and authority are never established, pursuing a task whose purpose remains opaque. What follows, in Samuel Beckett’s first novel of the trilogy that would also include Malone Dies and The Unnamable, is a journey that is also a decomposition: of narrative, of identity, of the certainty that language can tell us anything reliable about either the world or ourselves.

Beckett’s Molloy is one of the most radical acts of fiction ever committed to paper — a novel that dismantles the novel form from within, that uses the conventions of detective fiction and the picaresque to stage a philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness and the impossibility of knowledge.

Essential world literature — demanding, funny, disturbing, and irreplaceable. Published by Faber & Faber.