'A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity' - John Burnside

Artful and subversive, F tells the story of the Friedland family - fakers, all of them - and the day when the fate in which they don't quite believe catches up with them.
Having achieved nothing in life, Arthur Friedland is tricked on stage by a hypnotist and told to change everything. After he abandons his three young sons, they grow up to be a faithless priest, a broke financier and a forger. Each of them cultivates absence. One will be lost to it.
A novel about the game of fate and the fetters of family, F never stops questioning, exploring and teasing at every twist and turn of its Rubik's Cube-like narrative.
**Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015**

"A comic tour de force, a biting satire on the hypnotized world of artificial wants and needs that Huxley predicted, a moving study of brotherhood and family failure, F is an astonishing book, a work of deeply satisfying (and never merely clever) complexity . . . It is a novel of deep beauty, psychological insight and, finally, compassion; a book that, in a world of fakes and manufactured objects of desire, is the real article: a bona fide, inimitable masterpiece" - Times Literary Supplement

"Daniel Kehlmann braided art, religion and finance into a typically effervescent but heartfelt comedy-of-ideas about faith and fakery" - Independent

"It is this sense of a world potent with significance that seems at once within our reach and beyond our grasp that forms the central concern of this most accomplished, humane and unsettling of novels - a work that registers how it is to feel so alive to the 'terrible beauty of things' as to feel the world is talking to us" - Literary Review

"Daniel Kehlmann's subtly yet masterly constructed puzzle cube of a new novel . . . conveying the implicit message that Fate with a capital F has already decided the answer for us . . . Yet Kehlmann's ambitious narrative structure - the novel itself - provides the strongest rebuke of that deterministic claim. For the novel, with its sly Möbius-strip-like connectedness, doesn't just hint at the possibility of a plan behind the scenes; it enacts that plan in the very telling, its elegant, unfolding construction revealing the author's intended pattern by book's end; a sign of hope, perhaps, or even faith" - New York Times

"Intelligent, acerbic and quietly surreal . . . Powering the narrative is the explosive fallout from the collision between fate and self-determination . . . Subtle and clever in all the right ways. Kehlmann's world is fully convincing while being philosophically challenging. He has a hypnotic effect, seducing us with his storytelling while provoking us to find meanings of our own" - Saturday Telegraph

"It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off . . . In a godless world, love counts for a great deal. And failing love, ordinary human decency goes a long way. Since Kurt Vonnegut died, there has really been no one to tell us this; the reminder is welcome . . . F is about the world's absurdity, and this makes a huge difference morally. The world is big, and ultimately unknowable, and life is short and memory pitifully limited . . . It is very hard to express how funny this all is. But laughter matters most in the dark" - Guardian

"Compelling combination of digestible philosophy and buzzy page-turning thriller . . . the ideas in this book are big, exciting, an irresistible puzzle, and the prose flows like the Rhine - increasingly dramatic, occasionally soulful. F might be for Friedland and family and fraud but it is also for fun. And a fecking good read" - Big Issue