The Fabrications

The Fabrications is a wildly inventive, comic novel centered on a bizarre idea: what if someone's fictional story about your life started to come true? When Oscar Babel, a cinema projectionist languishing in obscurity, is befriended by Daniel Bloch, a popular novelist, strange things begin to happen when Bloch starts to write about Oscar. Oscar’s life changes course as he becomes a 21st century messiah. At the same time Bloch’s life descends into the darkness (and madness) that his friend narrowly escaped. Feeding in and out of this central spine are other stories: Bloch's reconciliation with his father, who was seduced by Bloch's ex-wife Natalie; the career of the brilliant but unsuccessful painter Najette, Oscar's muse and lover; and ever more insane instances of PR stunts, as master-minded by the demonic publicist Ryan Rees. Eventually Oscar's fame and myth balloon out of all proportion and the novel draws to an unforgettable climax. The Fabrications is a novel possessing peculiar relevance to our tumultuous times. It addresses the myths of celebrity, the power of the internet to disfigure and distort, and the madness of our culture, in which prophets, truths and legends can all be invented. Part meditation on synchronicity, identity and sex; part satirical critique of contemporary society; and part love story, The Fabrications is a novel that abandons realism and attempts to create a parallel universe that offers deep truths about the chaos and beauty of our own. It jostles with dazzling stories, and memorable, grotesque characters, and will take you on a wild ride, lurching among pathos, hilarity and profundity, breaking the rules of fiction in creating something subversive and beautiful.

Baret Magarian is of Armenian extraction, from London, and lives in Florence. In London he was a freelance journalist and contributed articles to The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. He has interviewed such diverse figures as Peter Ustinov, the brilliant actor-director and raconteur, John Calder, iconoclastic publisher of eighteeen Nobel prize winners, and Salman Rushdie, the celebrated novelist. He has worked as a lecturer, translator, fringe theatre director, actor and nude model. He is also a composer of piano music that is in the vein of Jarrett and Alkan and draws on the tonalities of Armenian music. His fiction has appeared in World Literature Today, Journal of Italian Translation, White Fly Press, The Sandspout, and Sagarana. His most cherished dream is that his writing might be a conductor and transmitter of light.