A dazzling debut collection: nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and strangely familiar.

Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, these stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming more savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story–set on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable–we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid, signaling the world’s transformation and decline. The remaining stories capture the strange– sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny–circumstances he encounters in the no-longerso- simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of “the state”; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips. Yet, in each story, we see that despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity.

Things We Didn’t See Coming is haunting, restrained, beautifully crafted–a stunning debut.

This book is on these lists:

• September 2009 Indie Next List
• August 2009 Indie Next List
• July 2009 Indie Next List