The Man Who Was Thursday.

Part spy thriller, part waking dream, part theological riddle, Chesterton's most famous novel spins the reader through a chase that grows stranger and more dazzling at every turn.

What it's about

The Man Who Was Thursday follows Gabriel Syme, a poet recruited into a secret police unit devoted to fighting anarchy. He manages to infiltrate the supreme council of a shadowy anarchist conspiracy, whose seven members are named for the days of the week. But as Syme penetrates deeper into the plot, the ground keeps shifting beneath him, and the conspiracy he thought he understood reveals itself to be something altogether more surprising than he could have imagined. What begins as a tale of intrigue and pursuit becomes a spiralling adventure in which identities dissolve, allies and enemies trade places, and the whole nature of the struggle is thrown into question again and again.

Themes

Beneath its breathless plot the novel wrestles with order and chaos, faith and doubt, and the hidden meaning that may lie behind a bewildering and often frightening world. Chesterton, subtitling his book "a nightmare," uses the machinery of the thriller to ask whether the apparent cruelty and confusion of existence conceal a deeper purpose that we are not permitted to see. Appearances deceive at every step, and the reader is invited to consider how little we truly know of the forces shaping our lives, and whether behind them stands something other, and stranger, than what we feared.

Why it still matters

More than a century on, this remains one of the most original and exhilarating novels in English, admired by readers who care nothing for its philosophy and by those who care for little else. Its influence echoes through later fiction of paranoia and pursuit, yet nothing quite matches its peculiar mix of wit, terror, and joy, or its headlong momentum. It rewards rereading, yielding new meanings each time, and it stands as the finest possible introduction to Chesterton's paradoxical genius and his gift for turning an argument into an adventure.

Who it's for

This book is for lovers of clever, fast-moving fiction that also thinks, for readers who enjoy mystery and adventure with a philosophical charge, and for anyone drawn to stories that unsettle as much as they entertain. Come for the chase and the anarchist conspiracy; stay for the dizzying questions it leaves ringing in the mind long after the final, astonishing pages.