City of Orange
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3.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone.
He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket?
He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in.
He could swear his daughter’s name began with a J, but what was it, exactly?
Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy—and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past.
He can’t even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I?
Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yoon (Version Zero) explores the nature of memory and reality in this atmospheric character study. A man wakes in a desert wasteland with no memory of who he is, where he is, or how he got there. As his survival instincts kick in, they bring shards of memories of his life before, including the painful realization that he has, or had, a wife and daughter. He explores his surroundings with extreme caution, discovering a small shelter with food, dozens of totems made from stacked stones, and a deserted condo containing a corpse and an clumsily constructed paper Christmas tree. As his memories seep back slowly, bringing increasing mental anguish, his understanding of his strange surroundings grows through interactions, real or imagined, with crows, an old man, and a young boy. The story moves slowly, but Yoon finds the tension in the smallest of acts—like heating up a can of soup—and builds suspense by teasing out information about the world, forcing readers to question everything. Fans of The Martian will enjoy this new take on the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar land.
