The Girls Who Saw Everything

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club loves to bring to life tableaux from the books they read. But when they begin to enact the Epic of Gilgamesh in the early days of the Iraq War, the book begins to enact them instead, sending the Cabalists across the globe and driving the narrators out of their own tale.

Cross-dressing Aline becomes obsessed with the Baghdad Blogger, Missy with the ticking of her biological clock, Romy with Emmy, and Emmy with the maker of the fitzbot, an ambulatory artificial-intelligence experiment. At the centre of it all is Runner Coghill and her little brother Neil, who are still mourning their sister and who brought to the group the ten priceless cuneiform Gilgamesh stones.

Underlying it all is the tale of telling the tale, the convolutedness and self-consciousness of our narrators, Jennifer and Danielle, as they reconstruct the history of the Lacuna Cabal to bring us a novel that is cryptographically charming and eruditely engrossing.

‘A sort of Tristram Shandy for the twenty-first century, Sean Dixon’s first novel is an intellectual, sexual, logorrheic, bibliophilic, cryptological, political and archaeological rant of the first order. It’ll change your idea of what “written in stone” means, and it’ll blow your mind too.’ – Michael Redhill