When Ariadne helped Theseus escape the MInotaur's labyrinth with the aid of a ball of thread, she led the way for the bewildered victims of a twenty-first century minotaur. Trapped in an endless maze of Internet chatrooms, a group of mystified strangers find themselves assigned obscure aliases and commanded by the Helmet of Horror, the Minotaur himself. As they fumble their way back to reality through a mesmerising world of abundant information but little knowledge, we are forced to wonder - can technology itself be anything more than a myth?

Author Biography

Born in Moscow, Victor Pelevin has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Open City and was selected by the New Yorker as one of the 'Best European Writers Under 35' and by the Observer as one of the '21 Writers for the 21st Century'. His novel, Numbers, won the Russian Grigoriev Prize 2004.