book cover of Come with Me
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Come with Me

(2018)
A novel by

 
 
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.


Genre: Mystery

Praise for this book

"With wit and compassion, Helen Schulman explores what happened, what might have happened, and what could still happen in the lives of one family. Clever and sparkling, fascinating and tender, eerily resonant, Come With Me is a novel for everyone who has ever wondered: What if." - Chloe Benjamin

"Helen Schulman once again displays her gift for mining the human story from the overwhelming complexities of modern times. While deftly exploring multiple realities--from digital relationships and technological disruption, to nuclear power and quantum mechanics-- Come with Me transports us to a singular, moving and powerful end." - Nathan Englander

"With her hallmark wit, authority, and precisely observed details, Schulman shows us the complexity of mid-life trials amid constant and immersive technology: the regret, the longing, and the undeniable wonder. A compassionate, astute, and irresistibly compelling novel." - Dana Spiotta

"Come with Me is an inventive and incisive novel about the way we live now and the way we might have lived. Helen Schulman is a gifted and generous writer." - Jess Walter


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