Adam Roberts - Jack Glass - Orion Publishing Group
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    • ISBN:9780575127647
    • Publication date:09 May 2013
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    • ISBN:9780575127654
    • Publication date:26 Jul 2012

Jack Glass

By Adam Roberts

  • Hardback
  • £14.99

Golden Age SF meets Golden Age Crime from the author Kim Stanley Robinson thinks should have won the Booker.

Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged.



Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain. JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour.



Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challanges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.

  • Other details

  • ISBN: 9780575127623
  • Publication date: 26 Jul 2012
  • Page count: 384
Biographical Notes

Adam Roberts is Professor of 19th Century Literature at London University. Three of his novels have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He maintains at least three seperate critical blogs. He has also published a number of academic works on both 19th century poetry and SF.

The absurdly talented Adam Roberts is...hauling British science fiction into a bright future of sparkling sentences and densely ironic conceits. Jack Glass is a dazzling trio of locked-room murder mysteries set in a brittle future autarchy, drawing heavily on golden-age SF but even more from the English detective stories of Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. — The Daily Telegraph
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