The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party

M. T. Anderson

Jan 2007 · Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Book 1 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Peter Francis James

About this audiobook

He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the best of classical educations. Raised by a mysterious group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother–a princess in exile from a faraway land–are the only people in their household assigned names. As the boy’s regal mother, Cassiopeia, entertains the house scholars with her beauty and wit, young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians’ fanatical studies. Only after he dares to open a forbidden door does he learn the hideous nature of their experiments–and his own chilling role in them.

About the author

M. T. Anderson is on the faculty at Vermont College’s MFA Program in Writing for Children. He is the author of the young adult novels Thirsty and Burger Wuss. He says of Feed, “To write this novel, I read a huge number of magazines like Seventeen, Maxim, and Stuff. I listened to cell phone conversations in malls. Where else could you get lines like ‘Dude, I think the truffle is totally undervalued’?” M. T. Anderson lives in Boston, Massachusetts.