Dare to Know
A Novel
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2.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A voraciously readable page-turner of a novel.”—Cory Doctorow
“A razor-smart sci-fi corporate noir nightmare. Dare to Know is what happens when Willy Loman sees through the Matrix.”—Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Shape of Water
This mind-bending and emotional speculative thriller is set in a world where the exact moment of your death can be predicted—for a price.
Our narrator is the most talented salesperson at Dare to Know, an enigmatic company that has developed the technology to predict anyone’s death down to the second. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he's driven to violate the cardinal rule of the business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: his prediction says he died twenty-three minutes ago.
The only person who can confirm its accuracy is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know. As he travels across the country to see her, he’s forced to confront his past, the choices he's made, and the terrifying truth about the company he works for.
Wildly ambitious and highly immersive, this thought-provoking thriller explores the destructive power of knowledge and collapses the boundaries between reality, myth, and conspiracy as it races toward its shocking conclusion.
“A voraciously readable page-turner of a novel, part creepypasta, part thought-experiment.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Radicalized
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The weight of knowing when death will arrive presses heavily on the characters of this enjoyable slipstream thriller from YA author Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish). The burned-out, unnamed narrator works for a company that delivers perfect predictions of when its clients will die, using an algorithm that measures "thanatons." He violates the company's cardinal rule when he uses the algorithm on himself—and discovers that, according to the calculations, he's already dead. The revelation thrusts him into a surreal quest to reconnect with the important people in his life, taking him through memories of his early days at physics camp, his university years and first love, and the subsequent, failed marriage he used to try to forget her. Kennedy ties the very personal quirks of his main character to the eccentricities of the universe, incorporating the lost city of Cahokia and the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054 into the mystery of the algorithm's error. Readers with a taste for the synchronicity of the cosmic with the commonplace are sure to be entertained.
