The 351 Books of Irma Acuri » (Bargain)

David Bajo holds an MA in English literature from the University of Michigan and an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine. Bajo has taught writing at UC Irvine Boise State and currently teaches at the University of South Carolina. This is his first novel.

Metaphysical literary suspense from a compelling new voice in fiction

For most of his adult life—through two marriages and countless travels—the mathematician Philip Mazyrk has carried on a love affair with Irma Arcuri. Now Irma has vanished and left Philip her entire library of 351 books, five of them written by Irma herself. Buried in the text of this library—Cervantes to Turgenyev, Borges to Fowles—lay the secrets of Irma's disappearance and, in the novels Irma has written, the story of her elusive and romantic past with Philip.

Philip, a math genius who sees equations in every facet of life, reads the novels and begins to sense a more profound and troubling design at work. A mysterious woman appears; his ex-wife reveals a terrible secret; his stepdaughter, Nicole, long troubled by the free-spirited nature of her parents' lives, approaches a dangerous turn; and Nicole's teenage brother has fled. As clues, warnings, and implications both inside and outside the library mount, Philip begins to realize that he too is trapped in a narrative. Who is Irma Arcuri? What is really buried in the library? And, most important, whose story is this?

Like the work of Milan Kundera or John Fowles, Bajo's novel is brazenly passionate, sexy, even transgressive, yet thrillingly mysterious. Addictive, compelling, and clever, The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri will captivate fans of The Time Traveler's Wife and The Shadow of the Wind.

Karl Iagnemma

David Bajo's first novel is a provocative and elegant meditation on love, literature, and mathematics. (Karl Iagnemma, author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction)