PATTERN RECOGNITION

Cayce Pollard owes her living to her pathological sensitivity to logos. In London to consult for the world's coolest ad agency, she finds herself catapulted, via her addiction to a mysterious body of fragmentary film footage uploaded to the Web by a shadowy auteur, into a global quest for this unknown 'garage Kubrick'. Cayce becomes involved with an eccentric hacker, a vengeful ad executive, a defrocked mathematician, a Tokyo Otaku-coven known as Mystic and, eventually, the elusive footage maker. In his first contemporary novel, one of the most influential writers of the past twenty years turns his attention to London, New York, the former USSR, and the ubiquity of modern branding - with dazzling results.