The debut novel by the iconic film director. Stylish and tech-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan are lovers and competitors. Nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity in the social media age, they encounter each other only in airport hotels and browser windows. Naomi is drawn to the headlines surrounding Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment. Aristide, suspected of the killing, has disappeared. Her interest aroused, Naomi sets off in search of the truth about the disturbing mystery. Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the work of a controversial surgeon.

But after sleeping with one of his subjects, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe's. Determined to meet the doctor who identified the disease, Nathan comes across Roiphe's daughter, a young woman whose bizarre behaviour masks a devastating secret. These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex. "Consumed" is an exuberant, provocative debut novel from one of the world's leading film directors. * David Cronenberg is the award-winning and greatly admired director of almost 20 films, including 'The Fly', 'Videodrome', 'Naked Lunch' (based on the William Burroughs' novel), 'Crash' (based on J.G. Ballard's), 'Spider' (based on Patrick McGrath's) and, more recently, 'The History of Violence', 'Eastern Promises', 'A Dangerous Method' and 'Cosmopolis'. * He is a cult director with mainstream appeal, and has legions of fans.

* Consumed is exactly what fans of Cronenberg's films would expect from his first novel: hypnotic, darkly comic, with vividly drawn characters moving through a landscape that at first seems alien, only to become curiously familiar. It is dark yet mischievously humorous; recognisable yet disturbingly uncanny. There is an interest in - and fetishisation of - technology, and the way we interface with the world; there is an undercurrent of perverse sexuality. In it, the imaginative brilliance of J.G. Ballard is married with stylistic verve of William Gibson.