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The Amateurs

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Product Description

Author: Harmer Liz

Brand: Vintage Canada

Color: Black

Number Of Pages: 336

Details: Product Description

In the style of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Dave Eggers’ The Circle: a post-apocalyptic examination of nostalgia, loss and the possibility of starting over.

Allow us to introduce you to the newest product from PINA, the world’s largest tech company. “Port” is a curiously irresistible device that offers the impossible: space-time travel mysteriously powered by nostalgia and longing. Step inside a Port and find yourself transported to wherever and whenever your heart desires: a bygone youth, a dreamed-of future, the fabled past.

In the near-future world of Liz Harmer’s extraordinary novel, Port becomes a phenomenon, but soon it is clear that many who pass through its portal won’t be coming back—either unwilling to return or, more ominously, unable to do so. After a few short years, the population plummets. The grid goes down. Among those who remain is Marie, a thirtysomething artist living in a small community of Port-resistors camping out in the abandoned mansions of a former steel town. As winter approaches the group considers heading south, but Marie clings to the hope that her long lost lover will one day return to the spot where he disappeared.

Meanwhile, PINA’s corporate campus in California has become a cultish enclave of survivors. Brandon, the right-hand man to the mad genius who invented Port, decides to get out. He steals a car and drives north-east, where he hopes to find his missing mother. And there he meets Marie.

The Amateurs is a story of rapture and romance, and an astoundingly powerful tale about what happens when technology meets desire.

Review

“Harmer’s funny, heartrending debut spins a standard tale of life on a depopulated world into a brilliant examination of abandonment and hope. . . . With a gently Gibsonian critique of consumer culture and a fiercely loving core, this wry novel ably satisfies both the literary reader’s desire for precise, beautiful prose and the genre reader’s eagerness for richly imagined futures. This is a sparkling, cohesive, and sharply insightful novel and a remarkable debut.” -Publishers Weekly

About the Author

LIZ HARMER’s first novel, The Amateurs, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. Her award-winning stories, essays and poems have been published widely, and she has been a fellow at both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences. She has won a National Magazine Award in Personal Journalism, was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and was a finalist for a Glimmer Train Prize. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Raised in Hamilton, Ontario, she now lives in Southern California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

At first, the public had been told that port worked like a revolving door, that it went both ways. PINA quoted people who reported that they’d evaporated and come back, and that the experience was glorious. Carpe diem, they said. You haven’t lived! Someone claimed to have been among the Arawak people before Columbus. Someone claimed to have witnessed the cave painters in Lascaux.

Marie had snorted in disbelief, sitting in front of her TV with the chopsticks in her hand hovering over a bowl of noodles. These so-called travellers had been in the Bahamas before Columbus, and they’d gone prehistoric, and yes, they were wearing appropriate costumes and had unruly facial hair, but they didn’t give any information about those times and places. What was it really like? Marie chewed sardonically, pointed her chopsticks at the screen. No. It was not believable. These people were awestruck and dumbstruck, but they knew nothing at all. Or they were manic for environmentalism. “You have no idea what it’s like with all the trees!” they said. Green so green it made your eyes hurt. Green so green it will make you grow leaves and buds. Contagious green.

This talk of colour had come close to tempting Marie. It was pathological to not be tempted at all. People around he

Release Date: 02-04-2019

Package Dimensions: 23x204x310

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