Ryan Boudinot - an up and coming author, whom Dave Eggers has called some kind of new and dangerous cross between Vonnegut and Barthelme - delivers his most ambitious and accomplished work to date - part Douglas Adams, part George Saunders; a novel that marries absurdism and satire with the outrageous high-concept storytelling of slipstream sci-fi. 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. | Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot, Paperback | Indigo Chapters