Blair's Reviews > Found Audio

If you love meta novels about lost media – and I do, though I acknowledge it’s a bit of a niche – this is a must-read. I’d describe it as The Witnesses Are Gone meets The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, with a detour via We Eat Our Own. It’s about a mysterious set of tapes, transcribed by an audio historian, with her manuscript, in turn, found and introduced by the author of this book, Campbell himself – the kind of layer-upon-layer, stories-within-stories framing that makes me excited about a story even when I’ve barely begun reading it. At the core of Found Audio is the tale of a journalist who becomes obsessed with finding something called ‘the City of Dreams’. His search takes him all over the world, from the last days of Kowloon Walled City to a chess tournament in Istanbul. It’s a sweeping, extremely propulsive adventure enlivened by a delicious element of uncertainty. For me, the potential scope of the plot was such that the book could have been much longer – twice, three times as long, even. And, all told, that isn’t a terrible problem to have with a book. Wish this wasn’t the author’s only novel!

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