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A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, in the thrilling new novel from twice Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

Benjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star jurist in Europe's highest court. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti at a conference in the Swiss Alps, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced by his new handler to pills he calls petits bleus, which take away the pain of his war wound, Stanton surrenders to sublime visions in which lurk dark traces of a violent incident back in Iraq.

Soon Stanton finds himself passing out court documents to Pirotti's colleagues - or just passing out. The court starts to detect leaks in security but suspects anyone other than its favoured legal theorist. Indeed, it is Stanton who is asked to draft a new, landmark ruling, more important and far-reaching than anything he has written before.

But Stanton has been working on something else: a vast, sprawling document made up of markings, patterns and encoded revelations that has the power to change the world which 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.