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Man in the Empty Suit
Cover of Man in the Empty Suit
Man in the Empty Suit
Borrow Borrow
"Part murder mystery and part mind-bending time-travel story. . . . Full of imagination" (Booklist).

Say you're a time traveler and you've already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the world might lose a little of its luster. That's why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and drinks twelve-year-old Scotch (lots of it) with all the other versions of who he has been and who he will be. Sure, the party is the same year after year, but at least it's one party where he can really, well, be himself.

The year he turns thirty-nine, though, the party takes a stressful turn. Before he even makes it into the grand ballroom for a drink he encounters the body of his forty-year-old self, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. As the older versions of himself at the party point out, the onus is on him to figure out what went wrong—he has one year to stop himself from being murdered, or they're all goners.

As he follows clues that he may or may not have willingly left for himself, he discovers rampant paranoia and suspicion among his younger selves, and a frightening conspiracy among the Elders. Most complicated of all is a haunting woman, possibly named Lily, who turns up at the party this year—the first person he's ever seen there besides himself. For the first time, he has something to lose. Here's hoping he can save some version of his own life.

"A clever enough premise that it could be straight out of a Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A dark hybrid of Paul Auster and the film Memento, complete with a mysterious love interest . . . Best of all, however, is the evocation of mid-21st century New York as a melancholy, dilapidated place high in entropy, cluttered with ruined buildings, and weirdly infested with parrots." —Toronto Star
"Part murder mystery and part mind-bending time-travel story. . . . Full of imagination" (Booklist).

Say you're a time traveler and you've already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the world might lose a little of its luster. That's why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and drinks twelve-year-old Scotch (lots of it) with all the other versions of who he has been and who he will be. Sure, the party is the same year after year, but at least it's one party where he can really, well, be himself.

The year he turns thirty-nine, though, the party takes a stressful turn. Before he even makes it into the grand ballroom for a drink he encounters the body of his forty-year-old self, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. As the older versions of himself at the party point out, the onus is on him to figure out what went wrong—he has one year to stop himself from being murdered, or they're all goners.

As he follows clues that he may or may not have willingly left for himself, he discovers rampant paranoia and suspicion among his younger selves, and a frightening conspiracy among the Elders. Most complicated of all is a haunting woman, possibly named Lily, who turns up at the party this year—the first person he's ever seen there besides himself. For the first time, he has something to lose. Here's hoping he can save some version of his own life.

"A clever enough premise that it could be straight out of a Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A dark hybrid of Paul Auster and the film Memento, complete with a mysterious love interest . . . Best of all, however, is the evocation of mid-21st century New York as a melancholy, dilapidated place high in entropy, cluttered with ruined buildings, and weirdly infested with parrots." —Toronto Star
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Excerpts-
  • From the book

    IT IS UNFORTUNATE for me that I am, by most any objective measure, a genius. I was forced to realize just how unfortunate on my thirty-ninth birthday. As had been my custom for nineteen years, I arrived at the Boltzmann Hotel in Manhattan on April 1, 2071. One hundred years earlier, across town at New York Medical Center, lay my mother, lightning flashing outside the single window in her gray cube of a hospital room as I kicked and refused to come out. Later, in my twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh subjective year, while horribly, inevitably drunk, I paid a visit to the hospital on the night of my birth in 1971. I'd stolen an orderly's uniform and faked my way through the halls, arms filled with bedpans, until I found the maternity ward. There she'd been, my mother, younger than I could ever remember, screaming and sweating. Inside her was me, preborn me, nascent genius (by objective standards, not mine), stuck on her pelvis and grinding my head into her spine.
    She never saw me. I left after placing a bedpan on the floor--the doctor had to trip on it, fall headfirst against the bathroom doorknob, and spend the rest of the night concussed and vomiting. He had to be replaced by an intern and a near-retirement nurse who knew more than all the rest of us present, who took hold of me and pulled me into the world despite all my objections. I knew this from many tellings of "The Night You Were Born." So I left the bedpan for the doctor.
    That was the only year of my time-traveling life when I spent my birthday anywhere other than the Boltzmann. It was the year I stopped serving drinks to myself from behind the bar and focused instead on the drinking of them before it. As I traveled, I counted my days. When another 365 had passed for me--subjectively, not objectively; objective time and I stopped talking years ago--I would direct the raft back to April 1, 2071. I would dock in the city at easily recalled locations--the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, the mayor's Gracie Mansion bedroom, beside the Astor Place "cube" statue,
    atop the Empire State Building's observation deck--and then walked directly to the Boltzmann. These places would echo with my footsteps, silence sealing in around me as the raft cooled and lost the pop and crackle of heated filaments and nearly burned-out wiring. In parking, my focus was making the raft easy to find. My celebrations were cloudier each year, and by my thirty-ninth subjective birthday the possibility of entirely forgetting where I was parked and being stuck in the vacant city seemed very real. Sometimes I left chalk arrows on walls, signed with my age, pointing me back to where I'd left the machine. I could also follow my own footprints in the ever-present mud--a mix of the constant rain and the slow demise of the city's concrete and stone. The city in 2071 is full of good parking places. Just one subjective year earlier, when I was thirty eight, I had parked inside what was left of Lincoln Center. It resembled a rookery, flocking with parrots, their inane chatter filling the darkness with conversations echoing Playbill notes and intermission critiques of performances ended decades earlier. Manhattan had become a parrot's island. I'd parked at Lincoln Center with Isadora Duncan in mind, a sentimental ode--I'd just left her in 1927--but upon returning to the raft I'd found it covered in bird droppings.
    Lesson learned.
    This time I parked in the dried-out bowl of Central Park's Pond. My machine winked in about four inches above the brown-clay mud bottom and then slid slightly lower into the septic water. I swore softly, but there was no finding a better spot. Once landed, the raft took nearly a full twenty-four hours to run...

About the Author-
  • Sean Ferrell's fiction has appeared in journals such as Electric Literature's "The Outlet" and The Adirondack Review. His short story "Building an Elephant" won The Fulton Prize. His debut novel, Numb, was described as "eye catching," "daring" and "offbeat." He lives and works, in no particular order, in New York City.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    December 24, 2012
    In this literary excursion into sci-fi, a time traveler has celebrated his birthday every year for almost two decades with past and future versions of himself in an abandoned Manhattan hotel in 2071. What makes his 39th birthday different is the fact that he stumbles across the corpse of his 40-year-old self. Because of a temporal blackout in their memories, none of the future versions of himself, known as Elders, knows what has happened, so they charge the time traveler with finding out how his 40-year-old version will be killed. Further complicating the mystery is the surprising presence of Lily, a lone female party guest. To understand her presence, the time traveler goes back in time to locate Lily at a previous point in her life, in a transformed, postapocalyptic version of the city, ultimately following her back to a hotel, where their entwined fates are revealed. Ferrell (Numb) has written a brain-teasing, paradox-defying, time travel mystery in the tradition of such pretzel-bending-logic classics as Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps.” But with a limited cast of characters, the reader eventually tires of being trapped in this hall of mirrors with a necessarily narcissistic protagonist, who, in the end, is less than the sum of his many selves. Agent: Janet Reid, Fine Print Literary Management.

  • Kirkus

    December 15, 2012
    A time traveler has annual reunions with his younger and older selves, with surreal--and often confusing--results. The narrator begins the novel with "Convention Rules," which can be construed as a pun. The "Rules" include cryptic advice such as "Elders know best," "Try not to ruin the fun for the Youngsters" and "Never reveal the future." In the extensive terminology created here, "Elders" refers to older versions of himself and "Youngsters."..well, mutatis mutandis. Amid the mind-boggling travels across time and space, including the Teutoburg Forest in the first century, when Teutonic tribes slaughtered a group of Roman soldiers, the traveler would invariably set his travel raft to alight in New York on the anniversary of his birthday--April Fool's Day, 2071. There, at the ballroom of the abandoned Boltzmann Hotel, he would have a family reunion of sorts with his various avatars, some of them comically recognizable through fashion statements that have become passe. The traveler identifies these selves with telling, almost allegorical, names (Turtleneck, Ugly Tie, Yellow Sweater, Spats). A tension arises when, on one of his excursions to the Boltzmann, the narrator's 39-year-old self discovers the body of his 40-year-old self (murder? suicide?), and the Elders point out that he's got to figure out this mystery or all of his "future" selves will cease to exist. Ferrell has a lot of fun playing out the ramifications of this paradox and complicates things still further by introducing a mysterious woman who shows up at the "reunion" for the first time. A narrative that strikes the head more than it strikes the heart.

    COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    September 1, 2012

    In Ferrell's (Numb) second literary novel, a time traveler gropes his way through a maze of clues and suspicions in an attempt to prevent an event from happening, without creating a paradox in the slipstream of time. The traveler celebrates his 100th birthday every year by traveling to 2071 as a 39-year-old man, to a party attended only by other versions of himself, young and old. But this time, he sees his 40-year-old self murdered. Without the cooperation of his Youngster or Elder selves he must solve the murder by his next birthday. The traveler challenges the conventions of time travel to accomplishwhat seems to be an impossible task. VERDICT For readers willing to jump on for the ride, this fascinating novel is engaging and thought-provoking, requiring concentration and commitment. It will also appeal to readers of Stephen King's 11/22/63.--Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL

    Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    January 1, 2013
    Ferrell, whose first novel, Numb (2010), followed a man with amnesia, ups the offbeat ante with this unique time-travel story. For the past 19 years, the unnamed narrator has been traveling back to New York City in 2071, where he gathers in a deserted hotel with various other iterations of himself, from the past and the future, and celebrates his birthday. But this year a body turns up dead, shot in the head, and it looks like the narrator is going to die, too. The book is part murder mystery and part mind-bending time-travel story. Consider this wrinkle: if the narrator is going to die in the very near future, then how can the very-much-older versions of himself still exist? And what about all those very-much-younger versions who are suddenly at the party? And who the heck is the woman named Lily, and how did she get there? Full of imagination and head-scratching conundrums, the novel may be too unusual to attract a mass audience, but it should definitely appeal to those who enjoy offbeat sf and mystery fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    September 15, 2012

    Fulton Prize winner Ferrell follows up his first novel, Numb, with the story of a time traveler who journeys to 2071 New York each year for his 100th birthday, encountering other versions of himself. At 39, he stumbles upon his 40-year-old version, murdered.

    Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Andrew Shaffer, bestselling author of Fifty Shames of Earl Grey "Ferrell makes a strong case to be the Kurt Vonnegut of his generation. Man in the Empty Suit is alternately funny, sad, and thought-provoking.... I wish I could travel back in time and write this book myself."
  • Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie "Man in the Empty Suit is a marvel: a complicated, soul searching, entirely riveting piece of work."
  • The A.V. Club "[Man in the Empty Suit has] an ingenious setup....Both Looper and Man In The Empty Suit track the trajectory of a pained, lonely man who learns what it means to sacrifice for the sake of another's well-being."
  • Kirkus Reviews "[Man in the Empty Suit] is tickling the Dr. Who parts of my brain, but in a really dark kind of way.... As you can imagine, this has one hell of an opening line: It is unfortunate for me that I am, by most any objective measure, a genius. Quite the set up for an interesting story."
    --A Home Between Pages

    Praise for Sean Ferrell's Numb


    "Ferrell's eye-catching debut is a mordant take on contemporary culture."
  • Publishers Weekly "Offbeat.... The book has a lot of heart."
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