From the author of Once More We Saw Stars, an electrifying debut novel about AI that calls to mind Never Let Me Go and The Candy House's tantalizing vision of the future.
Four interconnected souls grapple with an inexplicable tragedy.
Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and torme
In this heartfelt romance from the author of Always, in December and Yours for the Season, a bittersweet Christmas countdown opens the door to healing, hope . . . and maybe even love.
Ali has always loved Christmas, but this year she doesn’t think she’ll make it through. Christmas was always her and her best friend Robyn’s Every year, they exchanged Advent calendars filled with challenges. Tell the hot guy at the coffee shop you like him. Delete your ex’s number. Throw out the bathroom scales.
But this Christmas, Robyn is gone, because she didn’t get the heart transplant she needed.
There is one last calendar, though—given to Ali before Robyn died, with a promise to open it in December.
The first challenge sends Ali to the Alps, where she takes a seasonal job at the ski lodge that she and Robyn had planned to visit together. But when another challenge leads her co-workers to think she’s dating her boss—the stoic, seriously hot Leo—things get complicated.
To save her embarrassment, Leo agrees to play along. As Ali spends more time with him, she realizes that he’s grieving, too. And as he helps her complete Robyn’s challenges, she starts to wonder if their fake relationship could become something real.
But the truth behind Leo’s grief could bring them closer . . . or tear them apart for good.
nted by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the body of Cathy, a self-destructive ex-addict turned AI professor and upload-rights activist.
With UnWorld, Jayson Greene envisions a grim but eerily familiar near-future where all lines have blurred—between visceral and digital, human and machine, real and unreal. As Anna, Cathy, Sam, and Aviva’s stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of UnWorld reveal themselves with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?
