ONE MORNING THEORETICAL physicist John Ringer, sitting at his desk in his university, receives a cryptic text message. 'Cd me: H'. Who is H? His ex-lover Helen? Or is it a wrong number? So begins this highly inventive and oddly compelling novel, which encompasses parallel universes and parallel narrators. Andrew Crumey takes huge risks with his story by combining a multiplicity of genres - sci-fi, thriller, fantasy, farce; but somehow he carries it off. He teases us with scientific puzzles and paradoxes, entertains us with the elasticity of his plot, and before too long the reader begins to doubt his own grasp on reality.

Ringer is invited to the Scottish highlands to give a lecture at a remote research facility that is dedicated to investigating a new kind of communications technology based on the laws of quantum theory. It makes the Internet look like the pigeon post. Ringer is worried about the unstable nature