Throughout the month of May, as part of Reader's Den at New York Public Library, we will be discussing Nick Harkaway's 2014 novel Tigerman.

Harkaway is a London-based writer (born Nicholas Cornwell) who has previously published two novels, The Gone-Away World (2008) and Angelmaker (2012), as well as a work of nonfiction on the subject of technology, The Blind Giant (2012).

He also happens to be the son of David John Moore Cornwell who is better known as the spy fiction maestro John le Carré.

If you need a copy of the book, you can request  both the print and ebook versions of Tigerman through the NYPL catalog:

Tigerman (print)
Tigerman (e-book)

To give us a loose structure for the discussion, I've listed a schedule below, but please feel free to comment on notable sections of the book in any of the following posts:

Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Chapters 1-6
Week 3: Chapters 7-21

Perhaps the best place to begin discussing the book is at its very beginning (or even a few pages before). The novel is prefaced by a curious epigraph from the celebrated Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges:

My father had formed one of those close English friendships with him (the first adjective is perhaps excessive) that begins by excluding confidences and soon eliminate conversation.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

For any interested readers, the quote above comes from a short story, which is included in many, different compilations of Borges's work available from New York Public Library:

Borges, A Reader
Everything and Nothing
Ficciones (print) / Ficciones (e-book)
Labyrinths: Seleted Stories and Other Writings

Below are some general questions to get us started:

1. Have you read any other books by Nick Harkaway?
2. What kind of story do you expect purely based on the (exceptional) cover art?
3. Why does the novel begin with an epigraph by Jorge Luis Borges?