Things We Didn't See Coming
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown.
Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive. In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal.
In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival. Despite the chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next.
Longlisted for the Guardian first book award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Given that its nine linked stories are set in a postapocalyptic near future, the pleasure of Amsterdam's debut collection is surprising. Over the course of the book, just about every possible disaster assails the unidentified country in which the stories are set. Floods, drought, mob rule, and a virus that has one deranged character coughing up blood each play a role in the disintegration of the world as we know it, and Amsterdam's narrator survives them all, first as a thief, later as a bureaucrat (which turns out to be not much different from a thief), and finally as a 40-year-old, cancer-ridden tour guide. Among the high points are "Dry Land," in which the narrator encounters a drunken mother and her daughter clinging to each other in a cataclysmic flood, though each is more likely to survive alone; and "Cake Walk," with a narrator who hides in a tree while a man infected with a deadly virus destroys his campsite. Though a couple of the later stories lack polish and punch, Amsterdam's varied catastrophes are vividly executed, while his resilient narrator's travails are harrowing.
