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.