Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English journalist, poet, biographer, historian, debater, radio personality, and novelist who wrote more than 100 books on a wide variety of subjects. He is best known for his beloved Father Brown series of detective stories and The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, his genre-defying masterpiece that centers on poet-turned-detective Gabriel Syme in turn-of-the-century London as he infiltrates and pursues members of an anarchists’ society who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Button your frock coat and hold tight to your bowler hat as Chesterton plunges you through philosophical discourse, surreal allegory, metaphysical thriller, detective farce, dystopian fairy tale, and gothic romance in a madcap rollick that is, above all, indubitably entertaining!
Oh, what a book! How we envy you if this is your first read. You’re in for quite the metaphysical treat.
We’ve kept our Heathening to a minimum. We’ve updated some hyphened words to reflect their modern usage. Examples: “motor-car” is now “motorcar” and “frock-coat” is now “frock coat.” The great majority of our work, though, has been with the footnotes, of which there are several. As the plot is a raucous romp from London to France and back again, many of the annotations are concerning the various locales that our merry band of misfits, shall we say, crash along the way.
That’s it for us. We know what’s in store, so we won’t keep you. Enjoy the book!
“A wacky, nightmarish, deliriously well-written adventure story. It’s hard to think of a more thrilling book.” –Time Magazine
“The Man Who Was Thursday is not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it has something of all three . . . it remains the most thrilling book I have ever read.” –Kingsley Amis
“Chesterton’s tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy.” –Kerry Fried
“A novel that fundamentally believes in the decency and the wisdom of us all, and you don’t find too many of those.” –Nick Hornby
“It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.” –Terry Pratchett
“Chesterton’s great book gives me food, armor, and a compass for the soul.” –Anne Perry
“A raucous carnival of genres: thriller, farce, detective story, dystopia, fairy tale and gothic romance. It can be read as a philosophical treatise or a fraught expression of religious conviction but above all it is gloriously entertaining.” –Simon Hammond, The Guardian
“A myth both richly comic and nightmarish, and the scene at the end, where you discover at last who Sunday really is, is a theophany second in power only to the last four chapters of the Book of Job.” –Frederick Buechner
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