Your idea could live in The British Library forever. Pledge for Versailles* on Unbound for the chance to work with author Yannick Hill and help create one of the curious rooms featured in the novel. Entry deadline 31st August 2015.
As the daughter of Silicon Valley royalty, 16-year-old Missy Baer can have anything she wants. So why has she deleted her online profile and run away from home on the morning of her birthday, never to return?
Versailles is a fable for the information age, the story of a nuclear family set to explode.
Versailles is a 100-room mega-mansion set back from the Pacific Ocean, home to Casey Baer, founder and CEO of the internet's pre-eminent social network, and his family.
There’s his wife, Synthea Baer, former industrial designer and loving mother. She roams Versailles’ corridors in a drug-induced dream-state, searching for her children so that she might wish them many happy returns.
There’s River Baer, Missy’s twin brother. He spends all day in his cavernous bedroom dressed in a bear costume, pretending to be different people online. But why does he hate his father so much?
And then there’s Missy herself, driving into the sunrise in her birthday-fresh, black SUV. But where is she going? Is it something to do with the sword she received in the mail from an anonymous benefactor? And what about the voice on her phone, telling her where to go next? Is it some kind of cult? And what is she running from?
Is it something Casey did?
Of Versailles’ 100 rooms, the majority are locked test-chambers for Casey’s ongoing investigation into the human experience. In one room, a crew of actors play out a realistic plane crash on a loop. In another, varsity athletes from around the country come together for career-ending, bare-knuckle brawls.
And then there are the cameras. The thousands of cameras rigged up throughout the mansion.
Every second of every minute of every day, month, year and decade that the family have lived in this house has been captured, available to stream on any one of Casey’s multiple devices.
In an era of perpetual connectivity and mass surveillance, Versailles explores our dual need to be witnessed and to be alone.
Above all, Versailles is an entertainment, a rite of passage story about a girl trying to make sense of her life in the age of the internet.
More information
Yannick Hill
Yannick Hill is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. He learned to swim in Devon’s smugglers' coves, cycled with his little sister around Rome’s Circus Maximus as a teenager, won a snow shovel in a game of rock, paper, scissors in Japan’s bear country, navigated the Thames in a narrowboat, took up skateboarding in Southend-on-Sea, fell off his bike in Galway City and recently fell for a girl on a Paris dance floor (unrequited). He’s now back living in London, writing the stories that he wants to read.
Versailles is his first book.
*Includes all previous supporters. The higher you pledge, the more times your name will be entered into the draw.
How long will it take for my book to get dispatched?
For books in stock we usually dispatch orders within a few working days. You will receive a dispatch email when your order is on the way.
Where can I get my book delivered to?
We have temporarily stopped taking orders for published books going to EU destinations due to BREXIT restrictions, but we deliver to most other countries worldwide. Enter your delivery address during checkout and we'll display the shipping cost when we know where to send your book. If your country does not appear on the list we are not currently taking orders to that destination.
If I buy an ebook, when will I receive this?
Ebook files are sent via email after checkout, or you can download them from your Unbound account.
Where can I buy a copy if there's none available through the Unbound website?
The book should be available to order from most bookshops, or you can support your local bookshop online by ordering from bookshop.org.
Still have a question? Visit our Help Centre to find out more.
17th October 2016Reviews!
Two wonderful reviews have arrived for Versailles, one in this last weekend's Irish Times and the other in i-D magazine:
It's out there now. Versailles is whatever people want it to be. People are reading the book, they've been messaging me and calling me, telling me what they think and it's such a good feeling because now it's not really up to me anymore. The novel is its own thing, its own beast, a monitor lizard escaped from the cage and making its way out into the world, beyond the gates.
Foyles bookshop on Charing…
25th August 2016A Strange Adventure
Dear Everyone,
I suspect something may have arrived in the post for most of you by now, and if not you should expect your special holographic copy of my novel Versailles any day.
Doesn't it looks amazing?? Like my grandad said on the phone yesterday it looks like a jewel, a real treasure. And inside, at the very end are all your names, a list of all the people who made it happen. Thank you…
23rd February 2016Cover Design (The Reveal)
Hi everyone! Versailles now has a cover! I was sent it yesterday and I'm orbiting the moon with delight. You might remember me mentioning the involvement of award-winning designer Yehrin Tong (http://www.yehrintong.com). Well, here is what she's come up with and I think it's stunning. She's taken three of the key visual motifs of the book – eyes, monitor lizard scales and ocean waves – and woven them…
16th December 2015Cover Design
Time to break the silence as I finally have an update on Versailles, and it's all good news.
I've been getting a few messages from people who pledged for the book, asking about Versailles' whereabouts. Penguin/Random House, who are responsible for the printing and distribution of the trade edition, have deemed late summer 2016 the best time to publish the novel. It's a while to wait yet but timing…
1st September 2015Versailles Love
Blammo!
Funded! Third to last pledger was a taxi driver I was riding with at the time! This whole thing’s been a rollercoaster and I want to thank everyone again who’s supported me. You’re part of this. Your names will be in the back of the book, woven into its DNA. People I’ve known and those who will know me through my writing. It’s very moving, actually.
Versailles will be my first novel…
27th August 2015#VersaillesRoom
So you might have gathered that Unbound are currently running a competition where current and future pledgers are entered into a prize draw. The winner gets to work with me in creating a bonus room in Versailles itself, the 100-room mega-mansion at the heart of the novel. I for one can’t wait to revisit the world of the novel one last time.
The rooms making up Versailles are like test-chambers…
3rd August 2015How I write novels #6: In Dreams
Writing fiction is a kind of dreaming. I know writers talk about it all the time. They talk about flow. Inspiration. Losing yourself. But it's true. When I write I'm not all there. I'm in the other place, like opening your eyes under the surface of the swimming pool (no goggles). Writing is a kind of dreaming. Submergence. A relinquishment of self, or rather a division. Like a lot of modern writers…
27th July 2015Inside Versailles #6: Room 17
Hey! So to mark this very last phase of the Versailles funding campaign I thought I'd share a final excerpt from the book. One last room. For the uninitiated, each of these rooms functions as a test chamber for Casey Baer's ongoing investigation into the human experience. I give you...
Room 17
Every Wednesday, under cover of darkness, a black minibus with tinted windows and no license…
3rd July 2015Versailles nearly funded!
I've always liked the number seven. And four. No real reason, I just like these numbers, their sound and feel and colour. So I put them in my fiction when I can. When I need there to be a number of something I'll make it four or seven or multiples thereof. It's all part of that thing of ritualising the writing process, creating patterns where before there was blank space.
So today I hit 77%! That…
9th June 2015How I write novels #5: Southend-on-Sea
In the six months I lived in Southend in Essex I wrote one-and-a-half novels, it was mental. Seven days a week, 2000 words a-day, I spent most of that time in a kind of trance state, blueberries for breakfast (proven to improve cognitive function!) and miles of skateboarding along the promenade. Something about that place. The sense of departure I think: cargo ships headed out into the North Sea…
6th May 2015How I write novels #4: Exercise
So there’s anecdotal evidence that regular physical exercise can improve the brain’s flexibility in coming up with creative solutions, sometimes called ‘convergent thinking’. This has worked for me again and again as a writer. I’ll be typing away and suddenly something will interrupt my flow. It might be one of my characters not knowing what to say or do next, or an outright breakdown in plot…
14th April 2015How I write novels #3: I come up with a title
To write a fiction is to create a system of belief, or rather suspended disbelief. So for me a title is like a shrine. Around which I build a temple. Around which I build a world through which my characters might pass.
Versailles. I love this word. To me Versailles sounds and looks like what it is, or at least the thing we think of first: a palace. Versailles. It glitters in an imaginary…
24th March 2015How I write novels #2: Empty Buildings
I find empty buildings in the real world and occupy them with fictional characters. So for example there's a skyscraper in Philadelphia, it looks like this:
It was bought by the Church of Scientology back in 2007 with the intention of converting it into some kind of cathedral, but it's actually remained empty since. An empty skyscraper! It's things like this that really get me going. Something…
19th March 2015How I write novels #1: Photography
So one of the ways I start writing is by getting hold of a book of fine art photography, it has to be pictures of people. It doesn’t matter if the photographs are set up or documentary, as long as the pictures are of human beings, I’m gold. There’s something about this form. A captured moment. The artist Wolfgang Tillmans says he doesn’t make a distinction between a photograph that is set up and one…
11th March 2015Inside Versailles #5: Room 61
The cache. A room full of drugs and guns. It is set out like a post-raid police exhibit, the guns lined up lovingly on folding tables like show and tell, the drugs piled high in their compact, bulbous bundles of shiny brown tape. Floor to ceiling. These are real drugs, real guns, from bona fide seizures around the world. There are even a couple of grenades. All this. Street value: $100 million…
10th March 2015Behind the Scenes
My mum died a few years ago and I’m bringing this up now because after it happened, and I mean in the months immediately after, I experienced the most extraordinary period of creativity, focus and ambition. One day I was me. The next I was me writing Versailles, 2000 words a-day, seven days a week, until it was finished.
The novel isn’t about my mum. There’s no regret in the writing, no sadness…
2nd March 2015Inside Versailles #4: Room 84
Like shuffle mode for your music. Every time Casey enters this room it is a different experience. An incredible team of artists and technicians collaborating on the ultimate art form: life.
Every month they are given this space to work with and an organic budget. Sometimes the event will be very elaborate in nature, requiring long hours of preparation and the kind of ad hoc inventiveness only…
26th February 2015Inside Versailles #3: Room 44
Casey’s childhood bedroom. The same dimensions, wallpaper, curtains, a false window onto a neighborhood that no longer exists. Every object, all the furniture taken from the original room and transplanted here. The mood is undisturbed crime scene. And yet when Casey visits, he acts as though he were returning from playing out on the street, or spending Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house. He…
24th February 2015Inside Versailles #2: Room 27
Room 27 is a plane crash on repeat. A faithful reconstruction of a Boeing 767 cabin and cockpit, complete with full crew and passengers, all professional actors on Casey’s payroll. They might go for months without hearing from his people and then suddenly it’s every day for a fortnight.
Sometimes Casey takes on the role of drunken captain, but mostly he is a member of the public, taking his…
19th February 2015Inside Versailles #1: Room 7
The money room. A place Casey comes to experience his wealth in the form of a kind of permanent, interactive conceptual art installation. A gigantic animatronic dragon guards a cavern filled with actual gold and treasure. Gold bullion, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, various precious artefacts, large chests brimming over with shiny coins. It’s the real deal, the dragon so convincing Casey has to…
18th February 2015VERSAILLES (written in mid-air with sparkler)
What an amazing thing this is: to be able to talk directly to a future audience. I want to thank you early pledgers for your belief in Versailles, it means everything to me.
Writing a novel like Versailles is a strange experience. You pour all your love and soul into something, you draft and redraft and then one day you've finished, typos notwithstanding. Then the book's this presence in your life…
