Aristotle's Cuttlefish Matthew Dooley 9781787333956

You can tell a lot about someone from what they misplace.

Oddball Mr Daniels has spent his life sorting chaos into order.

In the basement of a shabby Town Council building, he has meticulously labelled, guarded and sometimes claimed the lost property of Dobbiston's residents for thirty years; a life's work carried out mostly unnoticed.

But when a bored teenager on work experience interrupts his routine, Mr Daniel's underground world is revealed to be both a lonely prison of his own making and a refuge for his peculiar, uncurbed creativity. A place where hit-and-miss experiments to make the elixir of life, or record the music of the spheres, help him to grieve and search for existential truths.

Told through Lost Property Office vignettes - a snooker cue love story, a granny's tea cosy and a kid's toy on an intergalactic adventure - local histories are elevated to the momentous and profound, drawn with playful nostalgia and Dooley's deadpan wit.

Aristotle's Cuttlefish is an irresistible and witty portrait of a close-knit northern town and the lives those lost and found characters within it.

Matthew Dooley won the Cape/Observer Graphic Short Story Prize and his debut FLAKE, published by Cape in 2020, went on to win the Wodehouse Bollinger Prize, the first time for a graphic novel. It was also a Guardian Book of the Year.


He is from the north-west of England and now lives in London.