9780156031370

"Alice Butler has been receiving some pretty odd messages - all anonymous, all written in simple code, all eerily vague but pointed enough to show that the sender has been watching her closely." "Are the messages from someone at PopCo - the slightly sinister, profit-hungry toy company that has herded Alice and its other top creatives out to a secluded Thought Camp? Are they from Alice's long-disappeared, treasure-hunting father? Are they from someone who knows that her cryptanalyst grandfather left her the key to finding that treasure? Is quiet Ben, Alice's new love, hiding something that could help her discover their source? And could it be that these codes will lead Alice to a secret even more carefully guarded than her own?"--BOOK JACKET.

SCARLETT THOMAS is the author of several novels. Named one of the twenty best young British writers by the National advertising Independent on Sunday in 2001, she was Elle Style's Writer of the Year in 2002. She writes for the Independent, Scotland on Sunday, the Guardian, and the Literary Review. She lives in Devon and teaches writing at the University of Kent.

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Paddington Station feels like it should be shut. Late at night, long after rush-hour, it has an echo and the occasional blast of cold, thin air that smells of diesel. This really is an ideal time to be in train stations, when hardly anyone else is travelling. It is almost half-past eleven at night and I am looking for my train, which is due to leave in about twenty minutes. The station feels like it is on beta-blockers. A pulse-yes-but slowed. A medicated slowness; a pleasant fug. This speed, if it were healthy, would belong to someone who trampolines every day, rather than to the owner of the more dangerous circulation you see clogging the station at five or six in the evening. For the first time in weeks I am wearing proper shoes, and I can actually hear my footsteps as I walk, a D Major scale playing on concrete. If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that I ever get lonely. Tonight I am wearing a long coat and a hat and I almost wish I was smoking an exotic cigarette in a holder because added to the coat, hat and suitcase, it would close the parentheses of this look, which I recognise from films and spy thrillers, but can't actually name, although I know people who could.I know people who would make all sorts of assumptions about the clothes I am wearing. They would assume I had chosen a "look." They'd see my shirt and jumper and want to say, "School uniform look today, Alice?" but then they'd see my tartan skirt, tights and sensible shoes and eventually conclude that I'm in what has been called in the past my "Bletchley Park" look. Having named my "look," these people would assume that everything was a deliberate part of it, that all my clothes and everything I have with me, from my purse to my suitcase to my knickers, had been chosen for a reason; to identify me, to give me my own code or stamp. Even if I wore-as I have done in the past-a truly random selection of old or weird clothes, this would simply be labelled my "Jumble Sale" or "Homeless" look. I hate this so much. They know I hate it, which is one of the reasons they do it, some logic dictating that when you act annoyed at something people do, it becomes funnier the more they do it.I work at a toy company called PopCo. Most people love working at PopCo. It's a young, cool company with no dress code, no rules and no set working hours, well, not for the Ideation and Design (ID) staff anyway. Our team, which used to be called Research and Design, but isn't any more, has its own little headquarters in a red-brick building in Battersea and people are just as likely to pull all-nighters making prototypes as they are to suddenly all decamp en masse to Prague for a week, trend-spotting and fact-finding. Ideas are everything, everywhere, everybody at PopCo. We

Excerpted from PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
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