"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by Vulture and LitHub A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X. Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself. A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.

The Mobius Book is two different stories in one: a memoir of Lacey's breakup with her husband and her reflections on that breakup in her subsequent world-spanning drifting, and a short novella about two friends meeting after their individual break-ups in an apartment. Neither the story or the memoir are tightly written; they meander around ideas and hover loosely around themes. Because you can read them in any order, about half of NUBClub read the fiction first and the other half started with the memoir. Overall, we liked Mobius Book, but none of it could call it excellent. Some of the strong parts are what we expect from Lacey -- the writing in places is just incredible and we found ourselves laughing every few pages at times at the wry comments she had. ('Separation is natural' - ::chef's kiss::) Her insight into the complexity of human relationships stay as strong as it has been in previous work. But where Mobius Book differs from other Lacey we've read is that this book is focused on a particular experience Lacey had - a confusing and deeply destabilizing breakup - both as the topic of a memoir as well as the inspiration for a story. In the memoir, discombobulation is embedded in the structure, such that the work floats from scene to scene, drifting through different encounters and ideas. In the fictional story, this is reflected in the lack of closure. The two characters oscillate between talking and then daydreaming about their own experiences and feelings, but there's no real growth. That said, certain themes stand strong. As a Mobius Book, there is no outside. Everything is focused on Lacey's opinions and perspectives. In the memoir, her ex is only referred to as The Reason and we never get his take on what happened. In the novella, a third character, K, is only a referent for the two women talking and exists as an expression of their relationship needs. The potential violence in the downstairs apartment of the fiction reflects the general threat of dissolution in the memoir, understood there through faith, hunger, and sacrifice. Overall, the themes of the work are consistent and strong. But it's a messy book by design and as a club who loved the Lacey from Biography of X, we all found something dissatisfying about how unstructured so much of the stories were. So for some NUBClubbers, Lacey just made a lesser work, a clearly intentional experiment to depict an emotional reality that wasn't that compelling to actually read. But those of us who liked it recommend it strongly, still as a more minor work of Lacey's, as a meditation on what it means to lose what you believe in and how humans support and hurt you as you process that.