From the ingenious mind of a language master: a wildly inventive novel about art, surveillance, our age of viral violence—and one woman's psychic survivalA troubled, reclusive heiress, Alice Knott lives alone, haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious, near-identical brother. Much of her fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find several of her most prized artworks destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow, and an astonishing legacy of international art hangs in the balance, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy—even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder.Hallucinatory, unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a mind-bending...

"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." —Time Out New York"[Butler's] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there's a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." —FlavorpillWith echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O'Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”