UnWorld — Jayson Greene

From the author of Once More We Saw Stars, an electrifying debut novel about AI that calls to mind Never Let Me Go and The Candy House's tantalizing vision of the future.In Unworld, Siri and Alexa have been replaced by ultra-personalized digital assistants called “uploads,” entities that contain all the sense memory of their “tethers,” the humans in which they are embedded as chips. When Anna’s teenage son dies in a violent fall from a cliff, she is shattered, and tormented by the question of whether it was suicide, an accident, or something even darker. Aviva, her upload, is so haunted by Alex’s death that she sues Anna for emancipation, citing unbearable grief. A short distance away, Cathy, a self-destructive ex-heroin addict turned AI professor and rights activist, offers Aviva “refuge”—metaphorical and literal space in her own body. To Cathy’s horror, she finds herself unexpectedly colonized by Anna’s anguish.Meanwhile, Sam, Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death, returns to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall. As Anna, Cath, Sam, and Aviva’s stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of Jayson Greene’s gripping suspense novel are revealed with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?