The Quantity Theory of Morality

by Will Self

Overview

“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation.”—Guardian

A blistering, refracted novel from the Booker-shortlisted author, elegantly bookending his Geoffrey Faber Memorial award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity

In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self’s unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. The disaffected, middle-class, middle-aged urbanites that populate his refracted parallel chapters seem helpless to stop the decay of their intimate, self-conscious social circle. And yet, as Self’s skewering (and self-skewering) grows ever more wildly imaginative, targeting faith, death, money, queerness, Jewishness, and nearly every piece of our social fabric’s connective tissue, it becomes all too clear that the decay cannot simply be cut out—their lives are rotten to their core. 

With recurring—if defeated—appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or “Proposition” shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. The Quantity Theory of Morality delicately bookends Self’s Geoffrey Faber Memorial award-winning story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which Martin Amis likened to a cross between “a manic J. G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge.” Although, as ever, “Will Self’s world is all his own.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802166296
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/10/2026
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including most recently Elaine, from Grove Press in 2024; Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London. will-self.com

Editorial Reviews

Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he’s the most fascinating of the tradition’s torch bearers.”—New York Magazine

“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.”—Guardian

“Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it’s as if he is the first person to see anything at all.”—New York Times

“Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book.”—New Yorker

“Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”—Independent

“Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self’s unrestricted writing . . . You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.”—NPR

“Will Self’s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.”—New Statesman

“Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion.”—New York Review of Books

From the Publisher