Headless

When workaday author John Barlow is asked to ghostwrite a novel about secretive tax havens, he assumes the job will be straightforward. Then he learns that his employers, Swedish conceptual artist duo Goldin+Senneby, want him to investigate Headless Ltd, a shadowy company with possible links to French philosophy and human sacrifice. Barlow travels to the Bahamas, the mecca of offshore finance, to uncover the mystery of Headless. Soon he is consumed by the dark world of covert capitalism and secret societies and his probing becomes desperate. The more he grasps at the threads of the labyrinthine plot, the closer he comes to madness.

“A mysterious and brilliant gesture of fictional investigation.”
— Joseph O’Neill, author of The Dog and Netherland, winner of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

“A remarkable, genre-bending work. Headless reminds us that it is when we leave reality that we are most thoroughly ensconced by it.”
— Bill Maurer, anthropologist and author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands

“K. D. has created a masterwork of metaphysical detective fiction. Headless is a coded, clandestine novel that nevertheless makes for breathless reading until the last page.”
— Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, artist

Co-published by Triple Canopy, Sternberg Press & Tensta konsthall
Design by Franklin Vandiver and Johan Hjerpe
Cover illustration by Johan Hjerpe

BUY:
Headless print edition (sold out)
Headless e-Book

Selected reviews: