A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, taking him into the dark heart of the systems that govern our world

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star jurist in Europe’s highest court. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced to pills his new handler calls petit bleus, Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti’s colleagues – or just passing out.

Entrusted with the drafting of an epochal, landmark ruling, Stanton instead begins work on something else: a vast, sprawling 'confession' made up of patterns, markings and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world that he and those around him have so carefully constructed. To destroy it, certainly, but maybe, from that very act of ruination, to usher in a bright new beginning.

The Rhyl Poster crafts a hallucinatory landscape where guilt – our own, and our whole era’s – is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

'A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry' Chloe Aridjis, author of Booker-longlisted The Shadow of the Object

'The most visionary of contemporary writers' Neel Mukherjee

'The high priest of the technological sublime' Ben Eastham

'Unfolds with the velocity of a thriller... Truly new, truly gut-flipping, truly exhilarating and vertiginous' Tim MacGabhann

© Tom McCarthy 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026