The New World

Author: Chris Adrian

Number of Pages: 224

What does love feel like beyond death? Jane’s husband Jim has just died – or not quite. For Jim, a mild-mannered chaplain at the hospital where Jane works as a surgeon, has left his body to Polaris, a shadowy cryonics organisation that promises to do away with mortality forever. Stranded in the realm of the living, reeling from the loss of her husband, Jane sets out to confront Polaris and to discover just where, exactly, his body is now. Meanwhile, awake in a strange new world, an afterlife of sorts, his body gone but his consciousness intact, Jim learns that the cost of eternal life is higher than he ever could have imagined. As the narratives of husband and wife – one alive, one dead; one faithful, one errant intertwine and loop from after-life to pre-death, so an extraordinary portrait of a marriage emerges; its losses, its secrets, its fidelities, its endurance. Beautifully constructed, thought-provoking, emotionally profound and witty, The New World is a pitch-perfect exploration of the power of love and the triumph of human connection over technological tyranny. It is a fantastical, funny and tender response to that most profound of marriage vows: til death to us part.