Blueprints of the Afterlife

From the "wickedly talented" ("Boston Globe") and "darkly funny" ("New York Times Book Review") Ryan Boudinot, "Blueprints of the Afterlife" is a tour de force. It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called "the Age of F***ed Up Shit." A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who's been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time--climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age--"Blueprints of the Afterlife" will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.