Blueprints of the Afterlife

“I am delighted by [Blueprints of the Afterlife], by its ambition and its creativity and its imaginativeness. . . . There’s so much to be excited about, in terms of how huge and antic the book is. I loved it.” —Rick Moody, author of The Four Fingers of Death

Ryan Boudinot is one of the most promising young novelists of his generation, called “wickedly talented” (The Boston Globe ) and “darkly funny” (The New York Times Book Review). Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force—part George Saunders, part Philip K. Dick; a novel that marries absurd satire with the high-concept storytelling of slipstream sci-fi.

It is the future. The end of the world is no more than a distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed-up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America’s cities. Medical care is supplied by networked nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not her own. And she’s right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s dragged his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medal to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who puts people in the right places at the right times—and it all culminates in a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. Blueprints of the Afterlife establishes Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.

“Take every high voltage future-shock you can imagine about life as it’s shaping up in the twenty-first century, process it through one of the smartest and funniest and weirdly compassionate sensibilities you’ll find on this crazy planet at this crazy moment, and you get a novel named Blueprints of the Afterlife. This guy Ryan Boudinot is the WikiLeaks of the zeitgeist.”