Pre-order your copy of this electrifying fusion of memoir, ghost story and speculative fiction from the late Ciaran Carson.

About X + Y = K:

Carson’s lifelong preoccuptations with memory, time and perception are pushed into audacious new territory in this astonishing work. Moving between Belfast and London, the novel traces the fractured consciousness of Kilpatrick, a man haunted by migraine visions, childhood trauma and the spectral machinery of history. As séances, scientific experiments and art-history musings bleed into one another, the boundaries between worlds grow porous: tables levitate, cities shimmer like palimpsests and the dead return in flickers of light.

Written with Carson’s trademark blend of forensic detail and lyrical expansiveness, in this animated narrative, parallel realities overlap, surveillance and spiritualism mirror each other and every object — paintings, watches, typewriters — carries a hidden aura.

A profound meditation on vulnerability, doubleness and the stories we invent to survive, and never published during his lifetime, X + Y = K is Carson’s posthumous, radiant act of imagination.

Ciaran Carson (1948-2019) was a Belfast-born poet, prose writer, translator and traditional musician. He worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before becoming Professor of Poetry and founding director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. His fourteen poetry collections won major awards, as did his translations of The Inferno and The Táin.