Cryptonomicon

Description

Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that have shaped the past century. Weaving together the cracking of the Axis codes during WWII and the quest to establish a free South East Asian 'data haven' for digital information in the present, Cryptonomicon explores themes of power, information, secrecy and war in the twentieth century in a gripping and page-turning thriller.

Neal Stephenson is the bestselling author of Reamde, Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine's top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Cryptonomicon, a novel of such ambition and intensity that most modern fiction looks timid and shallow in comparison... * Guardian * Cryptonomicon was dauntingly vast: brilliant, splenetic, paranoid and beguiling in roughly equal measures... Stephenson's...thrilling fluency * TLS * An audaciously conceived tale of code-making and code-breaking * New York Times * A brilliant patchwork of codebreaking mathematicians and their descendants who are striving to create a data-haven in the Philippines...trust me on this one * Guardian * Pynchon meets Gibson in the biggest novel of the season * Time Out *