Stop All the Clocks
By (Author) Noah Kumin
Skyhorse Publishing
Arcade Publishing
10th September 2025
United States
General
Fiction
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
813.6
Hardback
264
Width 152mm, Height 228mm
454g
A Thriller that Explores the Profound Mysteries of Life in the Digital Age
Mona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world-and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague Avram Parr and the collapse of her AI company, which left her a hefty cash-out, Mona retreated to her home on Roosevelt Island, free to toss her phone into the East River and curl up with a good book, forever.
However, strange occurrences disturb Mona's permanent vacation and thrust her back into the world. Colleagues from her former company begin to track her down and let on that there is more to Avram Parr's death than meets the eye. They all seem to believe that Mona possesses the crucial information about Avram that they seek, or, if not Mona, then her creation, Hildegard-an oracle-like bot that produces eerily prophetic poetry.
Stop All the Clocks is a rare literary thriller where the answer to the "whodunnit" isn't a person but modern life itself, where the conspiracy lies within the dark magic of digital technology-the ones and zeroes to which everyone is beholden-and the motive is the beguiling power of the words on the page.
Noah Kumin is the editor of the Mars Review of Books, the world's premier outsider book review, which has published seminal essays from Tao Lin, Sean Thor Conroe, and Magdalene Taylor, among others. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA in fiction from NYU, where he was advised by the late Martin Amis. He is the author of The Machine War, a philosophical history of computing. His next nonfiction work, The Mystagogues, will examine philosophical hermeticism through the lens of five mysterious twentieth-century writers.