The House of Rumour: A Novel - Couverture rigide

“I have always enjoyed Jake Arnott’s glam-rock gangster novels, but they hardly prepared me for The House of Rumour. Confirming that the inter-linked short story is the coolest literary form du jour, Arnott shuffled narratives about science-fiction, Scientology, Eighties pop stars, doomed love, nuclear physics and the occult into a knowing, clever and intricately woven collection that deserves to rain on Cloud Atlas’s parade or accompany Jennifer Egan on a visit to the goon squad. Brilliant and oddly moving, The House of Rumour deserved to win every prize going, including Eurovision. —James Kidd, “Books of the Year,” The Independent

“A conspiracy thriller filled with bewildering connections, dark conjecture and arcane information, The House of Rumour perhaps most resembles The Da Vinci Code, rewritten by an author with the gifts of characterisation, wit and literacy.” —Guardian

“Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad or David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, its form uses interlinked—short stories....The House of Rumour is a brilliant achievement that invites repeated readings.” — Independent
“A virtuoso blurring of fact and fantasy... Highly entertaining and perhaps even mind-expanding, Arnott’s high-class conjuring act shows that truth really is stranger than fiction.” —Sunday Times

Mixing the invented and the real, The House of Rumour explores WWII spy intrigue (featuring Ian Fleming), occultism (Aleister Crowley), the West Coast science-fiction set (Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Philip K. Dick all appear), and the new wave music scene of the ’80s. The decades-spanning, labyrinthine plot even weaves in The Jonestown Massacre and Rudolf Hess, UFO sightings and B-movies. Told through multiple narrators, what at first appears to be a constellation of random events begins to cohere as the work of a shadow organization—or is it just coincidence?

Tying the strands together is Larry Zagorski, an early pulp fiction writer turned U.S. fighter pilot turned "American gnostic," who looks back on his long and eventful life, searching for connections between the seemingly disparate parts. The teeming network of interlaced secrets he uncovers has personal relevance—as it mirrors a book of 22 interconnected stories he once wrote, inspired by the major arcana cards in the tarot.

Hailed as an heir to Don DeLillo’s Underworld by The Guardian, The House of Rumour is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through a century’s worth of secret histories.