The Möbius Book

by Catherine Lacey

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Pub Date Jun 17 2025 | Archive Date Jul 17 2025

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Biographies & Memoirs

Description

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub

Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and painfully true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. But through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, she charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and a heartbreaking—and heart-mending—exploration of endings and beginnings.

A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s power, and inherent danger.

A Note From the Publisher

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim...

Advance Praise

"Catherine Lacey has been climbing up the literary ladder ever since her magnificent debut novel . . . Now comes The Möbius Book, a hybrid fiction-memoir written in the wake of a brutal breakup. Lacey was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017, and rightly so—this new one runs the emotional gamut." ―The Telegraph

"Catherine Lacey continues to probe and puncture the membrane between what is real and what is imagined . . . Curious and entirely unique." —Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"A hybrid work of fiction and nonfiction, a genre-bending work that traces her relationship with her ex partner and with her former religious faith. Lacey’s work always surprises me and offers something totally new . . . Sure to be striking and singular." ―Literary Hub

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth." ―Meghan O'Rourke, New York Times-bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom

"A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy: What remains unknown (indeed, often unknowable) at the core of the people we know best? And how do we survive this unknowing? This wry, surprising, nimble book―allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight―achieves what only great art can manage: to be both impossible to imagine, and utterly necessary. I was absolutely spellbound." ―Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

"A deliciously weird mix of theology, allegory and dark humour, The Möbius Book is every bit as brilliant and electrifying as everything Lacey has ever written." —Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples

"Catherine Lacey has been climbing up the literary ladder ever since her magnificent debut novel . . . Now comes The Möbius Book, a hybrid fiction-memoir written in the wake of a brutal breakup...