With rights sold around the world, this irreverent comic adventure spanning three continents is poised to be one of the most talked about fiction débuts of the year.

A Fraction of the Whole marks the arrival of an ambitious new writer who deftly mixes humour, surprise, and astute observations of the human condition to create a novel that entertains, scandalizes, and enlightens.

Martin Dean spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything – from the benefits of suicide to the virtues of strip clubs versus brothels. Now that he’s dead, his son Jasper can fully reflect on the man who raised him in intellectual captivity.

As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father’s demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries – about his infamous and long dead criminal uncle, his tortured and mysteriously absent European mother, and Martin’s constant losing battle to make a lasting impression on the world.

It’s a story that takes them from the Australian bush to the cafés of bohemian Paris, from the Thai jungle to labyrinths, mental hospitals, and criminal lairs, from the highs of first love to the lows of rejection and failed ambition. The result is an uproarious indictment of the ridiculousness of the modern world and its mores, and the moving, memorable story of a father and son whose spiritual symmetry transcends all their many shortcomings.

I spent the next day staring into empty space. I get a lot of joy out of air, and if sunlight hits the floating specs of dust so you see the whirling dance of atoms, so much the better. During the day, Dad breezed in and out of my room and clicked his tongue, which in our family meant: ‘You’re an idiot.’ In the afternoon, he came back in with a loaded grin. He had a brilliant idea, and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to throw me out of the house, and what did I think of his brainwave? I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.
--from A Fraction of the Whole

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FINALIST 2008 - Man Booker International Prize

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“A fantastic, rollicking adventure of a novel, both startlingly original and hysterically funny. Surely this is the new picaresque, rivaling Ignatius Reilly and Billy Bathgate.”
– David Francis, author of The Great Inland Sea

“ [A] sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer. . . . Toltz’s exuberant, looping narrative [is] thick with his characters’ outsized longings and with their crazy arguments. . . . Comic drive and Toltz’s far-out imagination carry the epic story. . . . Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This misanthropic, laugh-out-loud funny novel tells the story of a brilliant, eccentric and star-crossed outsider and his son in contemporary Australia. With its chance encounters, mysterious criminals, malevolent townspeople, attacks of mental illness and mad schemes for civic and national improvement, A Fraction of the Whole is not so much a shaggy dog story as a woolly mammoth story. Martin Dean and his son Jasper take turns narrating a story steeped in Australian cultural icons: sporting mania, brush fires, the Ned Kelly myth, rapacious right-wing media barons, Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's also a story of Big Universal Questions as the two characters ruminate on religion, philosophy and death. Toltz's analytical, nihilistic loners are like Dostoyevsky characters who have wandered into an episode of Seinfeld, which, come to think of it was a Dostoyevskian sitcom.
- Winnipeg Free Press

"A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humour, and characters reminiscent of John Irving...A Fraction of the Whole soars like a rocket." –Los Angeles Times

"A riotously funny first novel...harder to ignore than a crate of puppies, twice as playful, and just about as messy." –The Wall Street Journal

"A startling debut....A non-stop, politically incorrect diatribe about — for and against — religion, politics, relationships, sex, marriage, work, play, children, sleep, friends, art, labyrinths, schemes, and dreams....Devastatingly funny." –The Seattle Times

"Rollicking....laugh-out-loud funny." –Entertainment Weekly

"That rarest of long books — utterly worth it....Witty and intellectual, a physical comedy and literary rant all at once....Comically dark and inviting." –Esquire

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Steve Toltz was born in Sydney and has lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. A Fraction of the Whole is his first novel.

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