**From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed
comes a futuristic thriller about science, love, politics, and social
disarray.**Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant,
nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game.
She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic
has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking
for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble
through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted
careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest
to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design
full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings.
For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and
accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but
eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And
in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work,
escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak
unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The
search for Della's son and Alex's missing papers turns out to hinge on
the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and
life.
A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social
observers, Kipper's Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at
the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally
human hunger for knowledge.
