Set in London, Paris, and Munich in the 1940s and 1950s, "Exquisite Corpse" is, like Irwin's cult classic, "The Arabian Nightmare," a novel about the strange and ever-morphing powers of the imagination. At once a love story, a mystery, and an investigation into the ideas of absurdist art, "Irwin's novel about English surrealism is funny and profound and hugely satisfying" (A. S. Byatt, "Sunday Times,"