For almost a thousand years, a prehistoric people living on the Greek islands carved highly stylized sculptures of the female body in marble. The Cycladic figurines, with their folded arms and blank faces, inspired Picasso and Modigliani, but continue to baffle archaeologists. No one knows what they mean or why they were buried with the dead. The Broken Notebooks is the story of one man's search for answers. Moved by their austere beauty, haunted by loss, his journey takes him from museums in London and Athens to looted graves on the hillsides of Greek islands, from meetings with marble workers and archaeologists to solitary encounters with his own past. The Broken Notebooks is a daring, unsettling novel - a montage of fact and fiction, reflections, readings, and voices. It's also a deeply personal meditation on death, failure, loss, and our place in a crumbling world.