*Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize**Shortlisted for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize **‘A horrifyingly comic novel of ideas with its fingers jammed into the light-socket of the age’ Guardian**‘A Kafka for the Google Age’ Daily Telegraph* U. is a 'corporate anthropologist' who, while working on a giant, epoch-defining project no one really understands, is also tasked with writing the Great Report on our society. But instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions. Is there a secret logic holding all these images together? Once cracked, will it unlock the master-meaning of our era? Might it have something to do with the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.