Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he has good reason to feel pleased with himself. As Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness – “the last frontier of scientific enquiry.” He enjoys an affluent lifestyle subsidized by the wealth of his American wife, Carrie. Known to colleagues on the conference circuit as a womanizer and to Private Eye as “Media Dong,” he has a tacit understanding with Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own back yard.

This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a distinguished novelist still grieving the sudden death of her husband more than a year ago. She has rented out her London house and taken up a post as writer-
in-residence at Gloucester University, partly to try and get over her bereavement.

Fascinated and challenged by a personality radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph’s bold advances, but resists on moral principle. The stand-off between them is shattered by a series of events that dramatically confirms the truth of Ralph’s dictum, “We can never know for certain what another person is thinking.”

"Lodge is one of the most readable writers now at work. In Thinks..., he shows himself to be at the top of his form: his smooth gift for narrative has never been more in evidence; neither has his easy way with the theoretical, or his mastery of (as he once wrote of the late Kingsley Amis) 'that combination of surprise and logicality that is the heart of comedy.'" Brooke Allen, Atlantic Online (read Atlantic Online's entire review)

"[L]ike all of Lodge's books, Thinks is so full of humor, humanity, intellectual energy and his distinctive slyly sexy take on life that you forget every barb you ever heard flung at the 'campus novel'....Watching Ralph try to seduce Helen right under the nose of his wife is fun — somehow Lodge makes it seem not sleazy. There's a generosity to Ralph's sexuality, even in potentially eye-rolling situations....As for Carrie, Ralph's wife, Lodge manages to make her an interesting character in her own right, much more than a passive victim of her philandering husband's shenanigans....In Thinks, as in his other books, Lodge's academics hold our attention not just because he gives them complicated sex lives and good senses of humor but also because he shows how seriously they take their work. Thinks provides us not only with an engaging, accessible overview of scientific debates on human consciousness but also with a look at the ways in which the humanities and the sciences are trying to find a common language to talk about matters that concern both. Forget clichéd notions about the boredom of academic life — while Lodge pokes fun at the pretension, the slowness, the provincial attitudes and the stultifying bureaucracy of the university, he makes his characters' actual work seem fascinating." Maria Russo, Salon.com

"Thinks... might sound like an ordinary novel of infidelity, but in the hands of critically acclaimed English novelist David Lodge, it evolves into a shining book, by turns witty, charming, sobering and honest." Michael Paulson, BookPage

"Lodge is at his best in another of his comedies of manners set in the academic world. His 10th novel is distinguished by gentle satire, vigorous intelligence, sometimes ribald humor and a perspicacious understanding of the human condition....Readers and booksellers will be more than pleased by this entertaining and appropriately thought-provoking novel." Publishers Weekly

"Lodge revels in the absurdities and poignancy of the creative drive, ambition, eroticism, infidelity, mortality, and love — the lifeblood of literature, the ghost in the machine, the force no computer can measure or emulate." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Thinks... does clever things. Lodge plays wittily with the techniques of stream of consciousness. The narrative dips, innovatively, into the email-epistolary mode. There are Bremnerish pastiches of the literary greats. And, inevitably, the gloomy Catholic skull pokes through the novel's comic skin." John Sutherland, The Guardian (U.K.)

"You have to be able to access a kind of willful surrender to enjoy David Lodge's world of stuffy, self-important academics and their oblivious toadies, but once you do, the pleasures are many and varied....[T]here is more talking than doing in this novel...but the wordiness of Thinks... is part of its success." Emily Hall, The Stranger (Seattle)

"The form occasionally gets the better of the gently funny and informative novel's momentum, but, as usual, Lodge makes his academics' foibles endearing. As knowledgeable as they are about the workings of the mind, they remain strangers to the mysteries of their own hearts." Keith Phipps, The Onion A.V. Club

Lodge offers a wonderful and witty take on love and life in the English midlands, a male midlife crisis novel of sorts which also chews over in a playful and never pedantic way such topics as knowledge, the self, the interpretation of the world, the nature of thinking, the modern novel, and the fundamental human need for narrative.

David Lodge's novels have earned comparisons to those of John Updike and Philip Roth and established him as "a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic" (The New York Times). Thinks . . . , his witty new novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciousness, unfolds in the alternating voices of Ralph Messenger, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, and Helen Reed, a novelist and writer in residence at the university. Mutually attracted, the two end up in a moral standoff that is shattered by events that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum: "we can never know for certain what another person is thinking."

DAVID LODGE is the author of ten novels and a novella, including Changing Places, Small World (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984), Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988), Paradise News, Therapy, and, most recently, Home Truths. He is also the author of several works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and The Practice of Writing. He lives in Birmingham, England.