Description de l’éditeur
'Epic... Apart from being the Emmy award-winning creator of the superb television series Fargo, the American author Noah Hawley is a talented deviser of high-class literary thrillers... It's a fabulous worst-of-all-fears scenario... Hawley attacks his narrative from a broad, TV drama-ish viewpoint, assembling a large, intercutting cast of characters' - The Sunday Times
'Noah Hawley taps into our existential anxiety- and transforms it into a hefty page-turner that's equal parts horrific, catastrophic and, at times, strangely entertaining' - New York Times
'Terrifyingly good... Hawley is such an experienced storyteller...this book is nothing if not art imitating life' - Irish Sunday Independent
From the visionary bestselling author of Before the Fall and The Good Father, an epic literary thriller set where America is right now . . . and the world will be tomorrow.
America spins into chaos as the last remnants of political consensus break apart. Against a background of environmental disaster and opioid addiction, debate descends into violence and militias roam the streets - while teenagers across the world seem driven to self-destruction, communicating by memes only they can understand.
Yet the markets still tick up and the super-rich, like Ty Oliver, fly above the flames in private jets.
After the death of his daughter, Ty dispatches his son Simon to an Anxiety Abatement Center. There he encounters another boy called the Prophet. And the Prophet wants him to join a quest.
Before long, Simon is on the road with a crew of new comrades on a rescue mission as urgent as it is enigmatic. Suddenly heroes of their own story, they are crossing the country in search of a young woman held in a billionaire's retreat - and, just possibly, the only hope of escape from the apocalypse bequeathed to them by their parents' generation.
Noah Hawley's epic literary thriller, full of unforgettably vivid characters, finds unquenchable lights in the darkest corners. Uncannily topical and yet as timeless as a Grimm's fairy tale, this is a novel of excoriating power, raw emotion and narrative verve, confirming Hawley as one of the most essential writers of our time.
'Hawley makes this sing by combining the social commentary of a Margaret Atwood novel with the horrors of a Stephen King book' - Publishers Weekly
* * *
PRAISE FOR NOAH HAWLEY:
'He has an intuitive understanding of human behaviour and an instinctive grasp of plot that make him a master storyteller'
Guardian
'An addictive thriller whose thematic richness is reminiscent of Franzen'
The Sunday Times
'Hawley's sublime prose glows on every page'
Daily Mail
'A thriller of masterful precision'
Independent
'High-class entertainment'
Mail on Sunday
'One of the year's best suspense novels'
New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this grim, thought-provoking near-future thriller from Hawley (Before the Fall), five Wisconsin teenagers die by suicide in less than two weeks, each writing "A11" somewhere near where their bodies are found. The plague spreads nationwide and then internationally, creating a mind-numbing death count. Adults struggle to understand what's happening, some theorizing that the fatalities are a consequence of the Covid pandemic's social isolation. Many fear the suicides represent an "act of collective surrender" presaging the extinction of humanity. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Simon Oliver, who found his older sister dead from overdosing on the opioids their family business manufactured, is told by a fellow resident of the Float Anxiety Abatement Center near Chicago, who calls himself the Prophet, that Oliver is central to establishing a new utopia to be started by children to save the species and the planet. Oliver joins the Prophet and some others in escaping from Float to realize the Prophet's vision. From the ominous sentence that opens the main narrative ("The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history"), the author creates an all-too-plausible dystopia rendered believable through matter-of-fact prose. Hawley makes this sing by combining the social commentary of a Margaret Atwood novel with the horrors of a Stephen King book.
