The Ticking Heart [B2325]

2019 PB in nice clean condition. "Expansive and imaginative." --Kirkus Reviews. Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria. One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband's missing heart. In fact, she's so insistent that she replaces Charlie's heart with a bomb. He has twenty-four hours to find Twiggy Miller's heart - and its meaning - or his own will explode. Tender and brutal, optimistic and despairing, this modern fable by the author of the cult hit All My Friends Are Superheroes takes a fresh look at what it means to fall into, and out of, love.

From recent-ish mixed Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This book reads like one long dream, which maybe sounds excruciating, but not when it's Andrew Kaufman."; "What did I just read???? I bought this book kind of on a whim, mostly out of genuine intrigue for the back cover blurb. It's a short book but WOW this is a densely packed piece of literature with lots of crazy stuff going on."; "What a wonderful book. The wordplay is fantastic, as is the imaginative story and characters."; "This book is amazing and it's silly Protons and inside your mind inside an American Imaginary place. Just right."