Under the Net

Included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels.

"Under the Net," Murdoch’s debut in fiction, is one of her best-known works—still modern thanks to the image of the main character, Jake Donaghue.

The translator and prose writer Jake is clever, ironic, and talented, yet also lazy. He has an amazing ability to drift with the flow of life—not so much because he can’t as because he simply doesn’t want to fight fate. He doesn’t care at all how to make a living—whether through cheap literary day labor or the hard work of a hospital orderly. The most he is willing to concern himself with is finding an inexpensive apartment. Yet an unexpected meeting with a young woman named Anna Quentine becomes fateful for Jake: his life begins to become entangled in a net of astonishing events that grow increasingly unexpected, taking an almost surreal turn…