Night Work, By Thomas Glavinic

The Austrian-based novelist Thomas Glavinic has a reputation in Germany which he's yet to match here, and his publishers are clearly hoping that this latest work will provide the breakthrough. It's a strange, defamiliarising tale of Jonas, who wakes up one morning in Vienna to find his radio, TV, computer, telephone and mobile producing only white noise, or worse, nothing at all. The streets are empty; nobody's at work. He is, it would seem, the last man on earth.

As he tries to establish what has happened with the limited resources at his disposal (how much we are a product of the information we consume is one of the themes), we start to see this is not some surreal dystopia, or that alternative universes are not about to reveal their own peculiar laws. And that's part of the problem: the novel sags in the middle because we know by this point exactly where it's not going to go, what we're not going to get. It's a novel with its own internal logic and its own deliberately flat, indistinct prose.