Space Bar

In a near-future shaped by artificial intelligence and immersive virtual worlds, the lives of three strangers collide, with consequences none of them can predict.

After receiving a terminal diagnosis, Jane Kim moves to Mexico City with a plan to end her life. Elsewhere, Inspector River investigates a string of unexplained disappearances while battling “Space Plague,” a mysterious illness that is slowly erasing his memory. In a digital realm, a figure known only as Space Detective searches for a missing girl, but finds that every answer leads to another vanished life. And Yoojin Im, a struggling writer, gets an unsettling call about the novel he thought no one had read.

As these threads converge across digital and real worlds, Eugene Lim’s comic detective novel Space Bar folds into itself, a Möbius strip of intersecting lives, worlds, and realities where memory, identity, and care become inseparable. For a generation worn down by the guilt of caregiving and the uncertain grief of watching loved ones disappear, Space Bar looks at what happens when the people we love—and the selves we know—begin to slip beyond our grasp. What do we owe one another when memory fails? And what if the crises reshaping our lives, from the personal to the technological, all begin with the same failure: our inability to recognize what is disappearing until it is too late?

Lim has built a reputation as one of American fiction’s most inventive writers. Praised by Lydia Davis as “fascinating and engrossing,” he brings all his trademark innovation to Space Bar, a novel about disappearing worlds, disappearing people, and the fragile stories that keep us connected to both.