Ned Beauman’sstunningly inventive, exceptionally funny and dangerously unsteady historical novel doesn’t even know what year it is.West Berlin. Egon Loeser is looking back over his strange and eventful life, from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris. Two questions still gnaw away at him. Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini? And, perhaps even more importantly, why can’t a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him ever just get laid?"For anyone who's read Christopher Isherwood or even just spent a few hours in front of the History Channel, a novel that opens in 1930s Berlin raises certain expectations: There will be decadent parties, and then one day a Nazi killjoy will turn up and soon the music stops, windows are smashed, Jews rounded up and everyone's lives subsumed by historical forces. The end. The Teleportation Accident, Ned Beauman's sly, exasperating and brilliantly written second novel, turns this comfortable trope on its head."-Jennifer Reese, NPRNed Beauman’snovels – four to date – have come about, he says, as a result of ‘the struggle I feel personally as a writer between my bourgeois realist literary fiction side and my pulp side’. That struggle is perhaps also why he is often labelled an ‘experimental’ novelist. Nevertheless, he confesses that part of the motivation behind The Teleportation Accident was as a response to reviewers of his first novel on Amazon. He decided ‘to take all the caveats they had and really emphasise those things, to slough off as many of them as possible’.