A Smuggler's Bible is the novel that launched the career of one of the most daring and original writers of modern fiction. Rick Moody described McElroy as one of the most supple, complex, and insightful writers of American prose . . . a contemporary voice that is surely as important as Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo. Driven by despairs as vexing and persistent as they are comic, David Brooke sets out to project himself into the lives of other people. One may wonder what ties connect the figures who diverse experiences are conjured up by Brooke's uncanny necromancy, what are the sad or bizarre or lunatic strands that draw together characters as disparate as the endearing monster Duke Amerchrome, the controlled Oxonian Harry Tindall, reserved English bookseller Peter St. Johh, and Brooke's own detached father, among others. Gradually there emerges an intricate and fascinating pattern of meaning, at the heart of which lies a single metaphor that in a thousand ways tells us who we are.