A Diagnosis

From a “supertaster of the present moment” (Jonathan Lethem), a brilliant speculation on the bureaucratic-corporate-pharmaceutical police state and the ways it acts upon our psyches and relationships

But a diagnosis will dog you. It will track your steps and follow you, panting, into the night.

New York is months into yet another police lockdown. Most people have abandoned the city. Stores are shuttered and the streets are empty, except for cops standing on every corner and the stream of drivers delivering packages to holdouts stuck inside.

Agatha—holding out in Brooklyn with Marco, her boyfriend, and Nathan and Emily, their two best friends—cannot sleep. She has tried every therapy and combination of pills, to no avail; with her insomnia only worsening under Marco’s claustrophic love, she’s taken to squatting in a vacant unit in a high-rise near their home, to be alone with her condition, her phone, her credit card debt, her unfinished freelance work, her ambivalence about having children, and her memories of the catastrophic event that precipitated the lockdown. Then a mysterious telehealth doctor diagnoses her with a new disorder, and things quickly get stranger.

Elvia Wilk’s witty, riveting novel begins in a somewhat familiar milieu before tunneling into an Other World of wounds, portals, doubles, hypnosis, and resurrections. Borrowing from noir, science fiction, and horror, and inflected by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the lives of medieval saints, and contemporary views on sleep, illness, technology, and relationships, A Diagnosis asks: Who is casting the spells that we live under today?