The Weaver Fish

Australian anesthetist Edeson’s enigmatic debut opens with an edited version of an address delivered to a Cambridge University society regarding the piranha-like fish of the title, for which there are more “words than reported sightings.” Chapter two dwells on an unusually designed London building, from a window of which was found hanging in 1963 the dead body of a Soviet Embassy attaché. Chapter three includes portions of an interview from the magazine Aviation Reviews with aeronautical engineer Walter Reckles, the author of a controversial book on surviving a midair collision, which maintains that passengers could pilot “aircraft fragments, particularly a wing, safely back to Earth.” Eventually, something of a focus emerges concerning the disappearance of the Norwegian-British logician, linguist and dream theorist Edvard Tøssentern in a research balloon over the South China Sea. Edeson leavens this whimsical academic send-up with endnotes full of fictional mathematical equations, but readers will struggle to figure out how everything connects. (June)