The first novel by the Booker Prize finalist Tom McCarthy — author of Remainder and C — Men in Space is a clever entrée into the art world, and a look at the bohemian life that was Prague in the 1990s.
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent and a stranded astronaut as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. The painting's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.