Blueprints of the Afterlife

by Ryan Boudinot

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.

• ISBN10: 0802170919
• ISBN13: 9780802170910
• Publish Date: 3 January 2012
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[violetpeanut]

This is a very hard book to review. As I said in my updates, reading this book is like reading someone else's dream in that it's completely bizarre, it jumps around, it sometimes makes no sense, but to the person dreaming it all fits together perfectly. The writing was very good and the descriptions and phrasing were amazing. This book was very dense in the way it was written but at the same time was not an altogether difficult read. It's the type of book that is enjoyable but you don't necessarily want to read another just like it right away. You need a little time to really wrap your mind around it before getting into another really "good" book. I need a little bit of fluff reading before I choose another like this one.