Set in a future that grows more plausible by the day, Stranger Beauty asks what traces will remain after a life has ended.

There are novels that describe consciousness and novels that enact it. Stranger Beauty is of the latter. With its narrative spun out of three notebooks, an embedded screenplay, and a final monologue delivered by an AI that has legally consumed a dead man’s life’s work, Matthew Gasda’s formally daring prose carries a powerful emotional resonance.

The architecture of the novel is not a stunt. Each section burrows, dreamlike, into a single psyche through repetition, contradiction, and the slow surfacing of things that were never meant to be seen. A marriage as alchemy. A brother lost to madness who emerges as the moral center of everything. And an artificial rendering of a man that speaks with more honesty than the living ever managed to accomplish.

An ambitious and original novel, Stranger Beauty is also deeply heartbreaking.