SYLVIE'S RIDDLE
Alan Wall

Sylvie Ashton spends her life pursuing images. In her work at the Signum Institute in Liverpool she stares for hours at images of stars, like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, or the sort provided by the Hubble Telescope. She is trying to understand the way we fashion the world through our lenses, and how the images we create become so embedded in our lives that we can no longer escape them.

Sylvie's husband, Owen, writes scripts for films. One of these, in its pursuit of the potent image, creates mayhem. Will he ever make sense of the human wreckage he has left strewn behind him? And will she? However luminous the stars are, however brightly they shine, it sometimes seems as if we are still painting monsters on cave walls. And such images can lead to torment as well as enlightenment...

The author of Bless the Thief and The School of Night has written a book about memory and betrayal, about the images we create and those we are relentlessly pursued by. In 2003, Alan Wall was awarded an Arts Council/AHRB Fellowship to work for a year with the particle physicist Goronwy Tudor Jones at Birmingham University. The aim of the Fellowship was to promote understanding between the arts and the sciences. This novel is the first book-length result of that fertile year. It is a measure of the author's gratitude that his novel is dedicated to Tudor Jones 'whose gift for exposition let me catch a glimpse of the astonishing insights of modern physics'.