a book about monsters Hopeful Monsters – Dalkey Archive Press

a book about monsters Hopeful Monsters – Dalkey Archive PressBy Nicholas Mosley Introduction by Sven Birkerts ISBN: 9781628975741 Publication Date: 3 10 2026 Thirty five years after its original publication, Hopeful Monsters reemerges as one of the grand intellectual dramas of the 20th century (The New York Times). A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student studying physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jew and political radical.

By Nicholas Mosley
Introduction by Sven Birkerts

ISBN: 9781628975741

Publication Date: 3/10/2026

Thirty-five years after its original publication, Hopeful Monsters reemerges as one of the “grand intellectual dramas” of the 20th century (—The New York Times).

A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student studying physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jew and political radical. Together, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth-century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test.

Originally published as the culminating volume of a series of five works of fiction entitled “Catastrophe Practice” that The Chicago Tribune called “one of the most important extended literary projects of [the 20th] century,” Hopeful Monsters is the first reissue in a new Dalkey Archive initiative to bring Mosley’s epistolary genius back into circulation for modern readers.

"The two things that are extremely impressive about this book are, first, its intellectual energy and rigour and, secondly, Mosley's gift, rivalling Koestler's or Bertrand Russell's, for summarising extremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligible manner." —Spectator

"This is a major novel. I read it barely stopping to eat and sleep. It is the sort of book that one reads again and again, making new discoveries at each reading." —Hampstead & Highgate Express

"Fascinating. . . . The novel achieves grand intellectual drama." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

"The most ambitious English novel written in the past 50 years ... an amazing achievement." —Washington Post Book World

"The culminating volume of a series of five fictions called 'Catastrophe Practice' that may be one of the most important extended literary projects of this century . . . Mosley has been feeling his way toward what is ultimately a hopeful vision of the human prospect after having comprehended—in virtually every sense of the term— the turbulence and torments resulting from this century's fierce intellectual and ideological conflicts." —Chicago Tribune

"A brilliant literary performance." —Forward

"What makes Hopeful Monsters a successful book is not so much its big ideas but the passionate intelligence through which they're refracted." —San Francisco Chronicle

"A rich panorama of 20th-century politics and ideas and an affecting love story, the novel combines the epic sweep and narrative drive of popular fiction and the intellectual authority of the best of Milan Kundera or Saul Bellow." —Newsday

"Intellectual and emotional history become delicately and provocatively joined in an agile narrative of the wages of hope in a monstrous century. . . . One of the grandest novels of ideas of our time." —Voice Literary Supplement

"Hopeful Monsters's success lies in Mosley's skill at personalizing sweeping historical events and complex theories ... an extraordinary novel." —Boston Globe

"There is, as always in Nicholas Mosley's writing, the pleasure of eloquent ideas eagerly and warmly shared." —Washington Times

Nicholas Mosley (b. 1923) was raised in London, England. He is the author of a dozen novels and a half-dozen works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed biography of his father, the late Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the fascist party in England in the 1930s. Films have been made of two of his novels, Accident (using a screenplay by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey) and Impossible Object. Mosley passed away in London in 2017 at the age of 93.

Sven Birkerts is the author of 12 books of essays and memoir, most recently The Miro Worm and The Mysteries of Writing. Former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he co-edits the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his wife.