Come with Me
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3.2 • 30 Ratings
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, A New York Post Best Book of the Week
Recommended by Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Skimm, The BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep
“Mind-blowingly brilliant…. Provocative, profound and yes, a little unsettling, Come With Me is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a family, and though it has hints of sci-fi, it’s so beautifully grounded in reality that it seems to breathe. Although it takes place over just three days, what’s so fascinating is that so many lives, and many possibilities, are lived through it. Truly, it’s a novel like its own multiverse.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.
"What do you want to know?"
Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.
Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?
Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.
Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schulman (This Beautiful Life) thrillingly probes the ways technology and its sometimes alarming possibilities shape a Palo Alto, Calif., family. In a town teeming with genius Stanford coders and "Silicon Valley royalty," Amy Reed is at loose ends: she works at a tech startup founded by her college roommate's son Donny; contends with her children's misbehavior at school; and suspects that her unemployed husband, Dan, is having an affair. Running is the only way she relieves stress, during which she imagines different, less encumbered lives for herself. But after Donny launches Furrier.com a VR service that allows users to shuffle through a catalogue of alternate realities ("What would have happened if I'd taken that job? Who would I have met?") Amy becomes a test subject, drawing the stuff of her daydreams frighteningly close to the surface. Meanwhile, Dan flies to Japan with his lover to document the nuclear wasteland of Fukushima, regretting having forgone a more daring journalistic career. As the Furrier technology advances and a tragedy at the local high school shakes the family to its core the family must assess what their lives are and what, refracted through the promise of technology and alternate paths, they might have been. Adroit and perceptive, Schulman weaves a deeply felt meditation on the anxiety and complexity of modern relationships.
