Success

About the book

Michael Annarly believes he has completed important work on an aerial torpedo for the great Galhardy foundries. Lady Sibyl Carson's admiration gives the achievement an emotional intensity that calculations and mechanical problems alone have not supplied. Around them, however, colleagues and social acquaintances assess his talent through jealousy, class expectations, and the interests of the firm. Annarly is valuable to this world without feeling naturally at home in it, and his confidence can look like arrogance to people whose conventions he disregards. Silberrad makes invention part of a broader inquiry into ambition and personal allegiance. The novel asks what recognition does to a capable outsider, especially when the desire to be understood becomes entangled with the desire to win influence, affection, and status.

• Talent and ambition
• Class and recognition
• Work and emotional dependence

Why read it

The industrial setting lets the novel test the difference between solving an engineering problem and navigating the people who control its rewards.

English text of the George H. Doran edition