Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

'...the book as a whole is a small marvel, overflowing with ideas. Scary, funny, shocking and touching by turns, it combines the readerly pleasures of constant reorientation with the sober charge of an urgent warning. ..' - The GuardianWe think we've seen it all before, but the future still arrives without warning.For the wry narrator of this riveting journey, each shift brings him somewhere new-he's protecting his grandparents from the world outside their city gates; he's evacuating squatters before the rains wash away everything; he's enjoying a senator's coddled enclave in the hills; he's being stalked up a tree by a plague survivor; he's negotiating love with a woman who is far tougher than he could ever be; he's leading adventure tours for the terminally ill. Despite the permanent emergency of the landscape, this fractured evolution feels anything but grim-instead, it reveals what it means to survive. "Preternaturally assured, finely crafted and thoroughly accomplished, it deserves to be read widely." -The Age (Melbourne)