The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

Overview

A New York Times NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
An NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
 
A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining masterpiece hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "Audaciously well written … the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it."
 
Set in three different eras, and in three different locations—all, coincidentally, named Venice—this “startling, beautiful gem of a book” (NPR) calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado.
 
The core story is set in sixteenth-century Venice, where, on the island of Murano, the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state-of-the-art technology, subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. Thus, for the skilled craftsmen that made them, any attempt to leave the island—to steal the technology—was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . .
 
Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . .

All three stories weave together into a spell-binding tour de force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612195155
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	592
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

MARTIN SEAY is the executive secretary for the village of Wheeling, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Believer, Joyland, Gargoyle, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. The Mirror Thief is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

How this book got published is a complete mystery to me. Not because it is not good enough, but rather because it is too good. I can't imagine any mainstream publisher not asking the author to cut at least 200 pages, include more human relationships, use more cause-and-effect plotting, not require the reader to look everything up all the time (including the major locations, which are not named), deliver on at least 50 percent of its promises and not bury significant plot details in a language and register that you need a postgraduate education and research skills to understand. But then it would just be like every other book. And The Mirror Thief, audaciously well written, demanding, frustrating and oddly enlightening, is absolutely not that.

The New York Times Book Review - Scarlett Thomas

★ 01/18/2016
Seay’s debut novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story. The first stop is present-day Las Vegas, where an ex-Marine turned manhunter named Curtis Stone descends into the Strip’s seedy underworld to track a famous gambler named Stanley Glass through the prefab canals of the Venetian-themed hotel and casino, but finds instead a mysterious book called The Mirror Thief. On that note, the narrative jumps back to 1958 in Venice Beach, at the dawn of the Beat poetry scene, where Stanley is a small-time con artist obsessed with the enigmatic Adrian Welles, author of The Mirror Thief. Finally, and most sensationally, readers are treated to the subject of Welles’s book himself, the man called Crivano, who in 1592 embarks on a dangerous mission in the Italian Venice, gorgeously rendered as a fantasia of conspirators, alchemists, and heretics caught between the dangers of plague and the Inquisition. Without realizing it, Crivano, Stanley, and Curtis are searching for the same thing: the mystery hidden behind mirrors (both literal and figurative), through which, as Welles writes, “you meet the stranger you have always been.” In sum, this is a splendid masterpiece, to be loved like a long-lost friend, an epic with near-universal appeal. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A New York Times NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
An NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
 
"Audaciously well written … the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it."—The New York Times Book Review
 
"[A] wondrous debut, a deliciously intricate, centuries-spanning tripartite tale of money and mysticism … Mr. Seay has conjured his own kind of sorcery, a sophisticated thriller that keeps the pages turning even as it teases the mind.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
"Transfixing ...The Mirror Thief is a startling, beautiful gem of a book that at times approaches a masterpiece.”—NPR
 
"Compared recently to the work of David Mitchell, Seay’s big, genre-ish The Mirror Thief is actually better than most novels by that author.”—Flavorwire
 
"Hugely entertaining.”—The Daily Mail
 
"A twisting, turning, metaphysical journey that’s sure to please fans of David Mitchell and Umberto Eco. Those are exalted names, but the depth of these stories and the straightforward artistry of Seay’s writing will woo those looking for a true literary experience.”—B&N Review
 
"It is easy to see why Martin Seay’s debut novel, The Mirror Thief, has been compared to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and comparisons to Elmore Leonard and Umberto Eco are also justified for this substantial and richly imagined novel, spanning three time periods and two continents … A transporting and original novel.”—BookBrowse
 
“The Mirror Thief establishes Seay as an impressive new voice to watch.”—Buzzfeed
 
"Masterful and mysterious."—Las Vegas Weekly
 
"The weirdest and most ambitious novel of 2016 thus far … a literary, speculative, mystical masterwork."—Chicago Review of Books
 
"A true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story … A splendid masterpiece, to be loved like a long-lost friend, an epic with near-universal appeal."
—Publishers Weekly starred review
 
“Grandly entrancing … Shimmering with intimations of Hermann Hesse, Umberto Eco, and David Mitchell, Sheay’s house-of-mirrors novel is spectacularly accomplished and exciting.”
—Booklist starred review
 
“The Mirror Thief is a remarkable novel—magical, sweeping, epic, and monstrous. It is a tour de force of writing that defies all labels and genres, three interwoven stories that will draw you into worlds of mystery, crime, violence, and obsession. The Mirror Thief is a work to be savored if you have the discipline, but more likely devoured if, like me, you simply can’t put it down. An astonishing debut novel of immense literary depth.”
—Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling co-author of The Monster of Florence and The Cabinet of Curiosities
 
“A 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents ... Part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno...An impressive feat of imagination.”—Bookpage
 
“The Mirror Thief is a perfect amalgam of the sort of pleasure I hope to get out of ‘literary’ fiction and the pleasure I get out of a beautifully plotted potboiler: it’s a page-turner I can’t put down in which the sentences are breathtakingly gorgeous. Every sentence of this novel is charged with a living energy that seems to come from the clouds. In scope, it reminds me of Roberto Bolaño—in execution, of Elmore Leonard or Richard Price. It is a novel of ideas that still knows how to describe a slot machine in such an evocative way that it makes me swoon. It is a deeply impressive work of art.”
—Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and The Fat Artist and Other Stories
 
“Readers, beware, as you embark on this journey through three Venices at three remarkably vivid moments in history. Like a card shark, a street hustler, a kidnapper waiting in ancient shadows, Martin Seay will trick you, dazzle you, spirit you away. I invite you to try your luck with The Mirror Thief; you can’t lose.”
—Zachary Dodson, author of Bats of the Republic

From the Publisher

2016-02-17
"What do you know about the sephiroth? Or gematria?" What, indeed? Cabala and codex, mystery and melodrama—it's all here in this debut novel. Since David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, every other commercially aspiring literary novel, it seems, jumps around over continents and centuries. This is no exception, with the perhaps unfortunate nexus of the Venices of California and Italy and the Venetian hotel of Las Vegas and a time span joining the Renaissance to the present by way of the Beat era. The cast of characters is suitably broad but with three principal figures. One is a salty, hard-boiled private investigator with a quick temper and a potty mouth ("fuck it, fuck Damon for putting some sketchy shitbag onto him without giving him a heads-up") who falls into the ambit of a sometime gambler, sometime philosopher ("At any given moment, you may be certain of the cards, but the other man—your opponent, your mark—you can never be certain of what he perceives, what he thinks, what he will do") who just happens to know a little something about a book, called, of course, The Mirror Thief, one that is in demand for the odd power it enfolds. It also contains a Nicosian ne'er-do-well who, four centuries ago, sets off on a mission that will find him tap-dancing his way out of the clutches of spies and inquisitors. He's a likable rogue, and by far the most interesting fellow in the book. Seay's great challenge is to bind these talky stories together, which he does to varying degrees of success; often the story seems an exercise in stringing together index-card notes on various arcane subjects, and while the book is well-written and admirable in the ambition of its scope, it still feels undercooked. Entertaining enough, if less a hall of mirrors than a house of cards.

Kirkus Reviews