‘Nights with Giordano Bruno should be burnt by the public hangman. It would have been in the good old days (that's the kind of book I was trying to write, at any rate). Which is appropriate, as Giordano Bruno, ‘peripatetic traveller, magician, writer, lecturer,’ and the subject of this novel, was burnt alive on February 17th, 1600 , in the Campo de' Fiori, Rome.

Bruno's crime was heresy: ‘Christ is not God, but a Magus and trickster, who was rightly executed.’ This book propounds heresies: it's pornographic and blasphemous. And its pages are out of order!

I should clarify ‘out of order.’ Nights with Giordano Bruno is intensely ordered. There are two kinds of pages in it: on the left— astrological diagrams, occult calculation, alchemical engravings; on the right—a series of stories. Sometimes the two are related and sometimes not. This is not a conventional novel!

Nights with Giordano Bruno is also an intensely contemporary work, set in late-nineties New Zealand , with a recognisable main character whose fantasy life gives it its shape, fantasies which may shock readers even more than explicit sex and violence.

The reader has to unravel the story. Bruno believed that even the Devil would be saved, which might incline us to see it as a hopeful book—a novel about lifting oneself out of despair and the labyrinths of the mind. However, Bruno also believed Moses, Christ and the Apostles to be deceitful tricksters, which might fit our protagonist better.” — Jack Ross