Steven Amsterdam

It's the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions. The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather. In Things We Didn't See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine. "I'll get fired." "No one will know." "Central will find out." "Anything named Central doesn't even know what you look like. I do, and I'm watching you to see that you make the right decision here." He waved us through.

Things We Didn't See Coming

Members of an extended family draw upon supernatural powers in times of crisis, and, over three decades, endeavor to come to terms with their fate as their magic is tested against the human traits of love and acceptance.

What the Family Needed

Richly imagined and darkly comic, Things We Didn’t See Coming follows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but treacherous weather, unstable governments, pandemic, and technology run amuck.

Ritratto di famiglia con superpoteri

EVAN IS A SUICIDE ASSISTANT. HIS JOB IS LEGAL - JUST. 'A poignant, sharply funny story that raises questions about life, death, and love' Louise O'Neill 'You might just want to find and hug a nurse after finishing this thoughtful and ethically nuanced novel' Guardian Shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2017. Evan is the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it. Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead. As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against the limits of the law - and his own morality. And with Viv increasingly unwell, his love life complicated, to say the least, Evan begins to wonder who might be there for him, when the time comes. From an award-winning author, The Easy Way Out is a brilliantly funny and exquisitely sad novel that gets to the heart of one of the most difficult questions each of us may face: would you help someone die?

The Easy Way Out

Ritratto di famiglia con superpoteri è un romanzo di personaggi straordinari. Ben, Giordana, Natalie, Alek, sono solo alcuni dei protagonisti di questa moderna saga familiare: ognuno di loro possiede, quasi per caso, una sorta di tocco magico che rende la storia ancora più speciale. Con uno stile e una grazia sorprendenti, Steven Amsterdam ci regala un romanzo che mescola reale e fantastico, amore e morte, X-Men e Le correzioni, e in cui i superpoteri sono solo una caratteristica, tra le tante, di una famiglia indimenticabile.

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

Michael Williams, in Melbourne’s The Age, wrote of this award-winning, dazzling debut collection, “By turns horrific and beautiful . . . Humanity at its most fractured and desolate . . . Often moving, frequently surprising, even blackly funny . . . Things We Didn’t See Coming is terrific.” This is just one of the many rave reviews that appeared on the Australian publication of these nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, the stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story, “What We Know Now”—set in the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable—we meet the then-nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. The remaining stories capture the strange—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny—circumstances he encounters in the no-longer-simple act of survival; trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rain never stops, being harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with a virulent flu, enduring a job interview with an unstable assessor who has access to all his thoughts, taking the gravely ill on adventure tours. But we see in each story that, despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity—and humor. Things We Didn’t See Coming is haunting, restrained, and beautifully crafted—a stunning debut.

In this incandescent novel, a family’s superpowers bestow not instant salvation but the miracle of accepting who they are. “Okay, tell me which you want,” Alek asks his cousin at the outset of What the Family Needed. “To be able to fly or to be invisible.” And soon Giordana, a teenager suffering the bitter fallout of her parents’ divorce, finds that she can, at will, become as invisible as she feels. Later, Alek’s mother, newly adrift in the disturbing awareness that all is not well with her younger son, can suddenly swim with Olympic endurance. Over three decades, in fact, each member of this gorgeously imagined extended family discovers, at a moment of crisis, that he or she possesses a supernatural power. But instead of crimes to fight and villains to vanquish, they confront inner demons, and their extraordinary abilities prove not to be magic weapons so much as expressions of their fears and longings as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and what fate deals them. As the years pass, their lives intersect and overlap in surprising and poignant ways, and they discover that the real magic lies not in their superpowers but in the very human and miraculous way they are able to accept, protect, and love one another.

Steven Amsterdam

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