Synopses & Reviews
About to depart on his first vacation in years, Edward Wozny, a hotshot young investment banker, is sent to help one of his firm's most important and mysterious clients. His task is to search their library stacks for a precious medieval codex, a treasure kept sealed away for many years and for many reasons. Enlisting the help of passionate medievalist Margaret Napier, Edward is determined to solve the mystery of the codex-to understand its significance to his wealthy clients, and to decipher the seeming parallels between the legend of the codex and an obsessive role-playing computer game that has absorbed him in the dark hours of the night.
The chilling resolution brings together the medieval and the modern aspects of the plot in a twist worthy of earning comparisons to novels by William Gibson and Dan Brown, not to mention those by A. S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. Lev Grossman's Codex is a thriller of the highest order.
Review
"[A] captivating thriller....A trip to England and a well-orchestrated final twist bring this intelligent, enjoyable novel to a fittingly understated conclusion." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Grossman...adds a new twist to the emerging bibliothriller subgenre by combining rare books with computer gaming." Booklist
Review
"Alluring and meticulous. Replete with a sexy duchess, a jaded academic...and a shadowy programmer." Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[A]n artful, populist, conceptually ambitious exercise....An addictive meditation on narrative addictions." Dennis Lim, The Village Voice
Synopsis
About to depart on his first vacation in years, Edward Wozny, a hot-shot young investment banker, is sent to help one of his firm's most important and mysterious clients. When asked to uncrate and organize a personal library of rare books, Edward's indignation turns to intrigue as he realizes that there may be a unique medieval codex hidden among the volumes, a treasure kept locked away for many years and for many reasons. As friends draw Edward into a peculiar and addictive computer game, his obsession deepens as he discovers surprising parallels between the game's virtual reality and the mystery of the codex.
An accomplished and entertaining thriller, Codex explores the mysterious power of books in the medieval and modern ages.
About the Author
Lev Grossman was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and studied literature at Harvard and Yale. He is currently a writer and book critic for Time Magazine. He has written feature articles for Salon, Lingua Franca, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York and The Village Voice, and was previously the producer of timedigital.com, Time magazine's personal technology website. This is his second novel. He lives in Brooklyn.