Things We Didn't See Coming [Paperback]

Gleefully apocalyptic novel...as ever with this kind of dystopian fiction, there is a satisfying tingle in imagining an Armageddon just round the corner. --Financial Times

What makes Things We Didn't See Coming such an impressive novel - and very impressive debut - is the playfulness of the writing contrasted to the grimness of the subject matter. In Amsterdam's hands the apocalypse sounds like it might be fun. --Sunday Times

Rarely has the darkness of life been looked at with such buoyant irony, imaginative grace and disarming ardour. --Irish Times

Should please reader who enjoys Margaret Atwood's dystopias. --Herald

Here's that rare thing - a post-apocalypse novel that's more than doom and gloom. A treat to read - playful, intelligent and intriguing
--Daily Mail

, `To enter the tradition of dystopian fiction, and with a first novel at that, requires a deal of chutzpah. Fortunately, Steven Amsterdam has plenty. Even in the blackest scenes Amsterdam's gift for mordant humour keeps the reader entertained and depression at bay, just about. What makes Things We Didn't See Coming such an impressive novel - and impressive debut - is the playfulness of the writing contrasted to the grimness of the subject matter. In Amsterdam's hands, the apocalypse sounds like it might be fun' --Sunday Times, Culture

'impressive debut novel...Amsterdam writes with tremendous assurance and his narrative teems with ideas, repeatedly twisting in unexpected directions. His disturbing but beguiling novel introduces a writer with a striking, original voice.' --Mail On Sunday

A mesmerising debut set in a not-too-distant future, in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and strangely familiar.

Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harrassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.

Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world a we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive. In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal.

In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific, and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival. Despite he chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next.

'Frightening, beautiful and funny' Evie Wyld

'Gleefully apocalyptic novel... Memorable' Financial Times

'Rarely has the darkness of life been looked at with such buoyant irony, imaginative grace and disarming ardour' Irish Times

'Here's that rare thing - a post-apocalypse novel that's more than doom and gloom. A treat to read - playful, intelligent and intriguing' Daily Mail

Steven Amsterdam, a native New Yorker, works as a psychiatric nurse in Melbourne, Australia.