The Candy House
From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time comes an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own--featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It's 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He's forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalising" memory. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, Own Your Unconscious--that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others--has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan takes her "deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture" (Vogue) to stunning new heights and delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.
Review
At its best it reads as if AM Homes, George Saunders and David Foster Wallace took turns in rewriting Middlemarch for our modern age. It's full of melancholic commentary about the human need for redemption, reinvention and reconciliation. ― Sunday Times
This novel is a triumphant exploration of analogue versus digital, surveillance versus freedom, literature versus technology. Egan's virtuosity in style and form allows her to reflect life online, her characters changing with the fluidity of a status update ― Idependent.ie
[A] colourful tale packed with poignancy... Egan has produced a powerful satire of social media culture while telling a deeply intimate story about family ― Spears Wealth Management
Egan is one of the few names that, when linked with the expression 'novel of ideas', makes the heart sing rather than sink ― Mail on Sunday
Intellectual, philosophical, empathetic, moving - The Candy House further cements Egan's iconic status in contemporary literature ― The Irish Times
[An] inventive, intelligent novel... rooted in human stories ― Good Housekeeping
Part social-media satire, part treatise on nostalgia and ownership of experience, The Candy House is experimental and intriguing, with each chapter often vastly different from the last... The Candy House is a tour-de-force, an exceptional book...bold and inventive...stunning ― Taum Herald
Exhilarating, deeply-pleasurable ― Prospect
Just as innovative, wise, funny and confounding as its predecessor. ― Metro
A mind-bending book full of techies and artists and savvy entrepreneurs...Just as you're in deep with one story, another unfolds in what is a true box of candy of a book ― The Gloss.ie
Everything [Egan] writes fizzes with ideas and feels wonderfully warm and engaging at the same time... [The Candy House] gives you more insight into how people tick than you'd get from six months' scrolling on social media ― The Daily Mirror
[A] mind-bending book full of techies and artists and savvy entrepreneurs catching various waves as the action moves from the late 1960s to the 2030s...Just as you're in deep with one story, another unfolds in what is a true box of candy of a book ― The Gloss
The Candy House... offer[s] [a] powerful and nuanced critique of surveillance capitalism ― The Guardian
Dazzling - and often very funny...Egan's style is compulsively readable ― The Tablet
A clever, endlessly inventive exploration of our increasingly connected, surveilled society and the individual yearning for privacy and meaning ― Guardian
For all its fluency in the languages of gaming, addiction and tech, this is a social novel with numerous characters and perspectives; a kind of 21st-century "Middlemarch" ― Economist, Book of the Year 2022
About the Author
Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.
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