The Rhyl Poster

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.

First published by Jonathan Cape (Vintage, Penguin Random House) in November 2026

[McCarthy’s] formally inventive fiction is preoccupied less with dramatic predicaments and clashes than with the structures and systems that create them . . . [its] complex circuitry makes The Rhyl Poster an excellent novel, a perfect fit for an over-circuited world.
—Adam Dalva, The New York Times

Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers, is light years ahead of anyone writing anywhere currently.
—Neel Mukherjee

A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry. A hymn to all the unacknowledged legislators of the world, which hums with the living ghosts of systems, signals and geometry.
—Chloe Aridjis

The Rhyl Poster is an unspooling diagram of one person’s dark corner of everything. Tom McCarthy has brilliantly mapped the insidious abstract spaces that both house and trap us, and hauntingly suggests a way out.
—David Musgrave

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

[The Rhyl Poster is] a cerebral and unsettling work disguised as a geopolitical thriller while functioning more as a study of fragmentation, obsession, and institutional decay . . . McCarthy’s prose is exacting, cold, and incantatory . . . He transforms systems into nightmares and paranoia into a form of often beautiful philosophical inquiry.
—Booklist, starred review

This deconstructed existential thriller memorably upends genre conventions.
—Kirkus Reviews