Voyage to the End of the Room

"Oceane (conceived on a cross-Channel ferry) doesn't get out much. But then there's a lot you can do in your room...Voyage to the end of the Room is Tibor Fischer back on top form - funny, provocative, foul-mouthed, ingenious, thoughtful, touching and completely original. Narrated by a woman who is equally funny, provocative etc, on the surface it's a novel about a failed dancer turned computer-graphics designer who's been around the block but these days doesn't leave her house. At heart, though, it's a meditation on how and whether you can ever know other people, what is evil, what is reality, what is humanity - and can you fake them? Or is there a litmus test for the real thing? Reality constantly bumps up against virtual reality, as the noel pans around the globe from Brixton to the holiday island of Chuuk by way of Barcelona, the Balkans and the Humber Estuary, introducing a fantastical cast of irresistable characters and their stories - from sad whores and pseudo-travel agents in Lambeth to perfectly formed sex-workers and 'wetwork' specialists in the Club Babylon, a Spanish Tower of Babel where our heroine used to work and bizarre deaths keep occurring; and from a scrupu