This is one of my favourite books this year so far. The timeline is both non-chronilogical yet completely linear and perfect for this story, complimenting the intricate spider-web of chapters as they interlink in the narrative. Each chapter is narrated by a different character and they're written so differently so that each character's voice is unique and Egan did a fantastic job at fleshing each character out even if they are only active in the story for a short while. I also admired the fact that the characters are incredibly diverse and yet it never reads like this had been shoehorned in for the sake of brownie points. The prose is easy to follow and sink into, but there are more experimental chapters such as a series of short statements from Lulu's perspective that read almost like poetry. I later found that this was originally published as a short story separate from The Candy House, and this doesn't surprise me in the least: it's beautiful.
In terms of the book's themes, I enjoyed how social media as a concept is explored and discussed by the different characters, and how it's much more nuanced than "social media is bad" or "social media is good". There's capitalism to consider, as invention is often 'neutral' until it's bought by corporations where profit and exploitation is valued higher than humanity.
This is definitely a book I will be buying a hard copy of, and while I've not read any other work by Jennifer Egan (and I'm told several of the characters of The Candy House feature in A Visit from the Goon Squad), I would definitely read some of Egan's work again.

This book is a fun blend of the realistic and fantastical, following in a similar vein from A Visit From The Goon Squad, which I read just before this book in preparation.

Although I think it can be read by itself without prior knowledge of The Goon Squad, I think it does help, adding some extra background colour to some of the scenes.

In the book, we follow various characters whose voices we bounce between, learning about how technological advancements that allow access to all thoughts and consciousness of a life can be used for good (ending certain types of crimes, reuniting lost friends) but also for ill, with characters becoming lost in the chasm between real and virtual.

I found it a fun and enjoyable read, with a pleasant imagination and sense of humour throughout.

I received an advanced copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Jennifer Egan’s latest is another SF adjacent novel, one that looks at social media and extrapolates our current obsession Facebook, Twitter et al into a near future where people make their actual memories available via tech, creating a collective shared consciousness that anyone can access. The book roams freely in time, showing us how such a thing came into being, and what a life in that world looks like. Like A Visit From The Good Squad, it’s a series of linked stories that reflect and feed back on each other. The characters are all connected, some by blood and marriage, some by shared experience, and others more tenuously - probably not unlike your Facebook friends list. A good part of the fun of the novel is tracking these connections and working out how the characters intersect. It’s fabulously readable, and Egan inhabits her different voices with aplomb. Marvellous stuff.

Proxies. Eluders. Typicals. Atypicals. Memory externalization. Collective consciousness. Counters. Impressionists. Sense Subterfuge. Stockblocks. Surveillance vs. Freedom. Collaboration vs. Exile.

There are a lot of futuristic concepts/lingo packed into these pages and a lot of characters to keep track of, but it's well worth the ride. Essentially, this book is about the future of big tech and big data. It asks: If you could access all of your own memories and the memories of others, would you? Interesting subject matter and laugh-out-loud funny at times! I'll be thinking about this read for a while.

If you're like me and didn't love the Goon Squad, give this one a chance - you'll be glad you did.

I hadn’t read A Visit from the Goon Squad in many years but I remembered correctly that it was excellent. I’m glad that I reread it before The Candy House because from the very start of Egan’s new novel-in-interrelated-stories I had a clear picture of who these revisited characters were.
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The Candy House has the same span as Goon Squad, both forwards and backwards in time, meaning that the reader is left satisfied and largely knowing exactly what happened to each of the characters who flick in and out of the stories.
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The characters focused on in The Candy House are largely the minor ones from Goon Squad, which for me meant that some were ones I had been desperate to know more about (I very much enjoyed the return and renaissance of Sasha’s Uncle Ted) but also some that I didn’t really care about, like Lou. It took me a minute to place Lulu but then I appreciate her return and actually the long chapter of text/email exchanges where she puts together a wildly complicated plan to confront her long lost father was amongst my favourite sections of the new novel.
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Having read Egan’s work before, I was used to her mix between stark realism and unexpected dystopia, moving between near future and recent past, but I still got a shock when the pandemic came up, and found it jarring to be put quite so firmly into reality. But of course our new ways of communicating - Zoom, for example - simply had to come up in The Candy House because how technology has influenced and ruined our lives is exactly what Egan does. I can’t wait to read it again to find even more hidden nuggets of truth.

Great writing but very little substance.

The Candy House is suppose to be a sort of science fiction about a shared consciousness. A sort of social media 2.0. Under this guise we read stories about an extended number of characters and their very little problem. Their very little and very American problems like drugs, a quest for authenticity, becoming someone and so on and so fort. Needless to say I never cared about the silly problems very rich(or in the process of becoming rich) American have, therefore none of this characters touched me in any way....

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan.

Happy Publication day to this book which will undoubtedly be in my top five reads of 2022.

I finished reading this a week ago and it has been swirling around my head since. This was so much more than I expected it to be. From the opening chapter I was engaged, then enthralled then absolutely blown away by this novel.

The Candy House is a " sister novel" or follow up to Jennifer Egan's 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. I read this back when it was published in 2011 but I had an army of very small children in 2011 so I don't remember it in great detail . Some of the characters reappear in The Candy House and the format is similar, a series of interlocking stories. I don't think you would have to have read Goon Squad to enjoy this, remembering it only vaguely, did not take from enjoyment or marvel when reading this.

The book opens in 2010 with tech entrepreneur Bix, looking and struggling for his next idea when he stumbles upon the idea of downloading or externalising memory. Within a decade " Own Your Unconscious" has a global audience. People can access every memory they have ever had and can share their memory in exchange for access to others. Life changing technology that many embrace and others question or are fearful of.

Told across twelve chapters , each one devoted to a different character whose stories all interlink and crossover jumping back and forth through time from the 1960s to 2040, a future that is so vividly believable and one we are hurtling towards it. Each chapter has a different style, this book jars and swirls and flips through time and themes and concepts. Exploring social media, image, gaming, memory, family, authenticity and ultimately connection, what we are all seeking in this world.

It is hard to put into words how much I enjoyed this book. It is also hard to describe the book and do it justice. It is so entertaining, perceptive, intelligent, easy to read, thought provoking and has so much heart. I loved it. Could not recommend it more highly. Deserving of all the prizes.

5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Candy House is really a treat for those who loved Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad. Seeing some of the old faces again - Sasha, Lulu, Bennie - was really wonderful, and what made this novel worth it for me. I also still really appreciate Egan’s use of form. She is masterful at weaving in and out of formats and does this especially well in The Candy House - the epistolary chapter was definitely my favourite, as it reminded me of the PowerPoint chapter from Goon Squad where I felt as though it really helped elevate the voices off the page.

What lingers in the background of this novel is a new company which lets you upload your consciousness to a ‘cloud’ to be able to access all of your memories, and even the memories of others. I liked how this wasn’t a central feature to the novel but more acted as a thread which bound all of the separate stories together.

Egan’s prose was just as colourful as it has always been and I think if you have the patience to appreciate this novel, having read Goon Squad previously, you will really enjoy it.

This book is another wild ride through multiple characters and points of view, different styles and time periods in the past and future. It’s enjoyable and terrifying at the same time. Could technology get even more invasive and intrusive? Would people really upload their consciousness for everyone to search? What a world to imagine!

The idea of Own Your Own Consciousness and Collective Consciousness - technologies repeatedly mentioned throughout this novel - are what really interested me. Unfortunately, there was perhaps less consideration of how these technologies were being/could be used in this book than I'd hoped. This book read as a series of snapshots of individuals' lives - the individuals were all linked in some way, although it was not apparent until towards the end how they were all linked. Whilst I've read quite a few books that adopt this approach and have loved some of them I didn't find that I enjoyed this book as much as I expected to. Perhaps it was because so many of the characters were unlikeable, perhaps because the book didn't really seem to have a plot as such. The ideas were certainly clever and the writing excellent but I can't say it's a book I really enjoyed or would necessarily recommend to others

The Candy House’s the sibling of Jennifer Egan’s hugely successful, award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad a complex meditation on aging and the passage of time, set around the music industry. Like Goon Squad this is structured more as an assemblage of linked, yet standalone, stories, 14 in total, than unified, linear narrative; it also moves around in time and space, from the 1960s to the 1930s, showcasing a similar range of narrative strategies and techniques. This too is rooted in a specialist area, the tech industry or more specifically social media. It revolves around an imagined creation, Own Your Unconscious, which enables users to upload and store their entire consciousness or opt to share it online as part of a larger collective. The technology’s the brainchild of Bix Boulton a Black entrepreneur who’s attained global fame, loosely modelled on Steve Jobs – Egan dated Jobs during her college years. Boulton’s concept follows on from earlier successes, inspired by a chance encounter at a New York gathering of academics.

Boulton, like many others portrayed here, previously appeared in A Visit from the Goon Squad only then he was a bit player. The candy house in the title refers to those glimpsed in fairy tales, devised by evil witches to lure unsuspecting victims, suggesting that, even though Egan shuns the dystopian label, this is a variation on a cautionary tale. The period preceding Boulton’s invention's marked by his growing feelings of dissatisfaction, a search for intellectual stimulation, the need to prove he can still be original and an intense mourning for a form of human connection he’s witnessed but never actually experienced. Own Your Unconscious seems to promise a level of connection and shared understanding otherwise impossible in ordinary everyday settings, but is it also something highlighting the need to be careful what you wish for?

Although the ostensible link’s the impact of Own Your Unconscious on the assembled characters, Egan seems less concerned with the traditional terrain of speculative fiction, and did no research into the techno-futurist elements – the tech’s mechanics are sketched out but the science behind it, and even the notion of what consciousness, or memory, might be is only hazily addressed. This leads to a certain, frustrating incoherence at times: for instance, on one level the technology allows for the unearthing of repressed or other forms of memory which become key evidence in securing convictions in historical child abuse cases, rather like accessing live-action replays; but at the same time it’s suggested that memory’s partial, partly subjective rather than reliable, unassailable truth. Perhaps this is because Egan seems far more engaged in the nitty-gritty of human interaction, at times the technology storyline seems to operate more as a conceit, or MacGuffin, allowing her to explore broader issues around loss, yearning and alienation.

Another apparent preoccupation’s with the “void” a sense of lack central to numerous characters' experiences, existentially lost, groping for something they believe’s just beyond their grasp, that will somehow make them whole and fulfilled. Part of this plays out through the extensive references to drugs and substance dependency, presumably building on issues that have haunted American society for some time, the failed war on drugs, the current opioid crisis. Egan often seems to be intent on chronicling, somewhat obliquely, the plight of the crumbling, anxiety-ridden American middle-classes. Although the idea that people desperate to numb their consciousness with drugs, or alcohol, or whatever else is available, might also want to preserve it’s an intriguing one. For one figure, Roxy, the tech offers a chance to relive her glory days, while another uses it to track down a chance acquaintance whose possible fate’s been bothering him for years.

Another major theme’s the quest for authenticity, which emerged from Egan’s reading of theories put forward by Daniel Borstein in the early sixties. An idea that mass media stirs cravings for access to some form of unmediated reality which it never actually satisfies. Egan’s compared this to TikTok and the way in which it promotes the idea of presenting something raw, unrehearsed, rather like eavesdropping on a conversation in progress. This is amusingly rendered in a chapter purporting to be a case study of a man so obsessed with immediacy that he routinely disrupts social settings by emitting loud, long-lasting screams. Set against this is a competing desire to categorise, anticipate and label every aspect of human expression, part of the work of the data quantifiers employed by Boulton’s company Mandala. Yet, as Egan has pointed out, data without nuanced interpretation or narrativization is pretty much redundant, failing to predict 9/11 or Trump’s election. This leads into Egan making a case for fiction, at least the kind contained on the page, and for the writers who shape and consider what meanings might be attached to thoughts, events or behaviours.

Overall, it’s a well-crafted, thoughtful, ambitious piece, that raises a multitude of relevant questions - although I’m not personally convinced they’re ones this kind of literature’s adequately equipped to address beyond the superficial. But I found it far less compulsively, or smoothly, readable as its predecessor, it’s much closer to a collection than it is a novel. There were some stories, like Roxy’s which really stood out, others which seemed a little perfunctory and less than enthralling.

This is exactly what I imagined it to be, in a very good way! I liked the first book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Black Box (Goon Squad #1.5) was very unique. to my surprise and joy, The Candy House was both, Great Read!

The story starts with familiar names that reveal it's them, we know them, heard about them before more or less. The individual characters were somewhere someday in touch, without an ordered timeline.

There were two main differences that I love this book more, (1) this time, it is not about music, the characters are in a more fictional and digital world, future, delusional, and spies! (2) I probably could have many parts of it shelved as Coming-of-age!

The writing style is memorable, and the way story goes on is so creative. My favorite part is about Lulu, she as a child and woman! Lana and Melora, Lou's daughters were great! Remember Noreen?!

"The secret to a happy ending, Mom used to tell us, is knowing when to walk away."

Also, a good thing is you can read the books as a stand-alone, although these are exactly the same people, from another point of view, children or other friends and of course, there are other stories to tell.

My huge thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK via NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this amazing book, I have given my honest review.
Pub Date 28 Apr 2022

This book reminds me of that early Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You". The premise is an extension of that concept-- being able to access all of your memories, externalize them, and share those memories with others. In this case, however, we see people also uploading them to share online.

Why would anyone do this? I found it amusing in the Lana and Melora chapters when they thought "no one would be dumb enough to do this" in response to "letting the Internet go inside their computers and play their music". I actually find the premise of this book extremely believable. Even as little as twenty years ago, I think people would have been shocked to hear how 2022 sees people, on a mass scale, sharing intimate details of their lives all over the Internet with complete strangers. Imagine telling someone in the 1980s how we all post pictures and comments and wait around for strangers around the world to validate us with "likes".

No, I think we do have a compulsion to be, if not liked, then at least understood. I think far too many of us feel we'd feel better if only we could adequately explain ourselves. And too many of us, for all kinds of reasons, are attention-seekers at some point in our life. I could see future humans uploading their memories to the Internet and I could also see it being a crisis for mental health.

But this seems all negative so far, and the technologically Egan imagines here is anything but. Sure, there are plenty of people with moral objections to Mandala, but the good it has done?

...tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies...


It is this speculative/sci-fi aspect of The Candy House that fascinated me and kept me reading until the end.

The reason I am giving it three stars is because this book is maybe 20% speculative fiction about humanity being able to access their memories (and all the ways this tech shapes the world) and 80% character studies of LOTS of different people, many of whom I never became invested in.

The Candy House reads like many interconnected short stories, not unlike A Visit from the Goon Squad from what I remember, but I found them very mixed. Some of the characters I gelled with easily, like Lana and Melora, and Gregory, others I swear my eyes glazed over reading about them. Like Chris Salazar who runs a nonprofit called Mondrian, dedicated to reclaiming people's privacy.

And these are very detailed, slow-build character studies. Which is fine when the characters and their stories are of interest, but it is very difficult to sit through the daily minutiae of someone you don't care about. I found it odd how the author would sometimes detail every "itch on his balls" yet speak about huge life-changing concepts in the abstract, telling rather than showing that, for example, "Heroin is her great love, her life's work, and she has given up everything for it".

Even as I say chunks of the book bored me, I can recognise it as an amazing achievement. It is a very complex, thoughtful novel that left me with a ton of things to think about. It feels both futuristic and highly relevant to our times, as many of the downsides of the fictional technology of Mandala are issues at the centre of current debates about privacy, access to information, access to misinformation, public shaming, and authenticity in the age of performance culture.

I didn't love reading it as much as I'd hoped, but I think I will love thinking about it for a while.

We long to connect with others; it's the human condition. Extrapolate from all the posting we do on social media and imagine opting to share your consciousness. Would it work? Would we be happier? Jennifer Egan examines this concept in her fascinating and absorbing new novel, The Candy House. Recommended.

Jennifer Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad is rightly considered one of the key novels of the post-millennium period. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it touched the zeitgeist of the time, particularly in terms of discussion about how the internet, and digital technology in general, was changing our relationship to the culture that shaped us, with a particular focus on the music industry.
Egan is still concerned with that here and the candy house of the title is a Hansel and Gretel-esque reference to the price that must be paid for the shift from physical cultural content to a more easily accessible (and stealable) digital form. But times have moved on and Egan’s focus has moved on from digital downloads to the continually encroaching effect of social media upon our lives.
Not that this should in any way be considered a dry thesis on technology and social change. And, truth be told, Egan is at her weakest when trying to play the futurologist. Goon Squad’s content delivery tech for pre-verbal babies was no more convincing than Candy House’s admittedly chilling social media tech in which you can upload your actual consciousness. But then, Egan’s intention is not so much prophecy as satire, so this is perhaps a slightly churlish objection.
As with Goon Squad before it, Candy House succeeds is in both its humour and in its treatment of character. Many of these characters will be familiar, having appeared in Goon Squad and most, if not all, are welcome. In a recent interview, Egan expressed a fear that she might end up writing fanfic for her own creations and there are times when that fear might seem not unjustified. But that is down to her choices as much as anything. We spend rather a lot of time with music producer Lou Klein, a character I was rather over by the end of Goon Squad. And while I was glad to spend more time with Lulu and Jules Jones, part of me wished that more focus had been put on characters who were either new or who had had very little attention focused on them in the first book (techpreneur Bix Bouton springing immediately to mind).
And this is more than a (fanboi) quibble about not receiving more content about my favourite characters; there’s a structural concern as well. The book follows the same format as its predecessor – a series of inter-connected short stories – but with an underlying structure that there was a cohesive whole that served the themes of the book. The sense of that feels weaker here, with some of the stories being there less to serve the unity of the novel and more as mere vignettes in themselves.
But while it may not have the strength and impact of its predecessor, this is still a terrific book that is at turns funny, moving and sometimes even terrifying (especially if you’re a social mediaphobe). The characters are as engaging as ever and its underlying sense of the current state of the world feels largely spot on.

After reading and admiring A Visit From The Goon Squad in 2011, I went on a bit of a Jennifer Egan binge, burning through Look At Me and The Keep as well. Funnily enough, though, I can remember very little about any of those books now. (The only Egan book I do remember clearly is the later, less popular Manhattan Beach). I attempted to re-read Goon Squad back in 2020 and failed to finish it; what had felt fresh and daring nine years before now felt a bit shallow and hackneyed, apart from the iconic Powerpoint chapter. Due to this, I wouldn't have requested an ARC of The Candy House had I realised it was a loose companion to Goon Squad. From that perspective, I'm not sure I can even call The Candy House disappointing; it's just more of the same.

The Candy House claims to be about a new technology called Own Your Unconscious, which allows you access to all human memories uploaded into the 'collective consciousness' as long as you upload yours in return. In short: it's not. You could remove Own Your Unconscious from the vast majority of this book and it would have no impact on the plot or themes. In itself, not a big deal, but it points to a wider problem with The Candy House; Egan just isn't interested in how being able to access other people's actual experiences would transform our understanding of humanity. Like one of my least favourite Black Mirror episodes, 'The Entire History of You', The Candy House is more interested in using this technology to play out the same kind of stories rather than thinking big. Once again, a literary writer appropriates a SF trope that has been explored far more thoughtfully and adventurously elsewhere (see also: Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me, Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility).

Even this would be less of a death knell for The Candy House if Egan used the sections of the novel, which are told through multiple perspectives, to prove her mission statement: that the novel is really the only thing that allows us access to the collective consciousness. However, as in Goon Squad, beyond the gimmicks, most of her narrators sound and think the same. Part of the reason I struggle to keep track of her large and disparate cast of people linked to the music and later the social media industry is that they aren't clearly differentiated from each other. Imposing different structures on different sections (spy instructions; algorithms; D&D terminology) doesn't mean you have actually developed distinct voices. There are a couple of sections that worked better for me - Molly's teenage voice is fresh and different, while the long email exchange near the end of the novel is a lot of fun - but that was about it.

The candy house, in this novel, is either the social media algorithms that tempt users in, believing they can get stuff for free while they're actually selling their own data, or a nostalgic 'memory palace' built by past generations to lure the young back towards a world they remember. Both are interesting themes (the latter rather more so than the former) but neither are adequately explored in The Candy House. Sadly, this just wasn't for me, and I think my interest in Egan's work has also come to an end.

I loved this book so much that I was tweeting about how good it was when I’d only read 20% of it .I read a copy on NetGalley Uk prior to its publication in the Uk
I tend to read without knowing much about the snook beforehand I was aware the story had elements of futuristic technology and covered a wide time frame but not much else
I loved the way that we are introduced to different people during the book So that in the end we are left with a feeling of a web of inter-relations rather like the electronic web stories that underline the book in the form of Own your own Unconscious.This technology is gradually fed to us as we read and I particularly enjoyed this gradual understanding that dawned
The individual people’s stories are beautiful and we are left with glittering tableauxs oR still lives of tiny pieces of people’s life stories .I particularly enjoyed the woman who steals things from people she knows and then displayed them as art .We see snap shots of her life as we do if other characters as they pass through both their own lives and those of others .We see the links the meet ups ,the relationships and in some cases how these individuals influence each other’s lives .
I particularly empathised with the character who after a successful youth is stalked by the possibility of not being able to continue to innovate in later life and with the mother who mourns her children as they pass onto adulthood and are no longer the children who were so very needy
I loved the way the author can switch her focus and consequently those of her readers from
The tiny intricate to the wide population focus
The author has such a perceptive view of how people think
,her characters personalities radiate from the page and are instantly recognisable as part of the human condition
I personally would have liked more about the Own your own unconscious technology in the book however o did also enjoy the light touch the author had at hinting at its effects without being direct about it ,it did seem an entirely possible ne t step from current day social media.
I loved the description of the neurodivergant character which I found entirely believable
I had not read A visit to the Goon squad before reading it but after finishing I did go and buy a copy .The first book does explain some story lines on The Candy House that were left a little unclear or incomplete .I don’t think this affected my enjoyment or the reading experience but it was good to discover more about The General for example

I’m summary this book is fabulous it is deep wide ranging whilst still being an enjoyable read .I would give the book 5/5 stars and recommend to readers who like a literary novel with a huge heart .The book is published in the Uk at the end of April 2022 and I am sure will be a huge success

Jennifer Egan returns to the world of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad in her new novel The Candy House. The Candy House revisits the same characters and their children and hangers on and is delivered in the same connected short story style that jumps around in time and occasionally plays with different structural forms and narrative styles. While music was the uniting theme in the original book, this one ties things together with considerations of memory and connectedness.
Egan opens with Bix Bouton, a multimillionaire who made his money from commercialising the internet. Bix is looking for inspiration for the next big thing and through a range of circumstances finds it – a technology that allows people to upload their memories to an external device which is marketed as “Own Your Unconscious”. As the technology develops it allows people to share their memories on line and explore different events from others’ points of view. But this book is not about that technology. Egan is not interested in exploring all of the ethical and moral implications of ‘Own Your Unconscious’, rather she wants to use it as a device to drive some of the drama and to highlight her thematic concerns. And in some stories it does not impinge on the story telling at all.
Despite going for a thematic coherence, Egan is not able to recapture the spirit of her earlier book. In fact by going over some of the stories again, this feels like a bit of a retread rather than something new. Much like the band reunion that gets organised in one of the later stories that brings many of the characters together. And there are so many characters and relationships that it is hard to keep track. But as in any collection like this some characters and stories stand out more brightly than others.
Fans of A Visit from the Goon Squad (and there are plenty) will enjoy catching back up with the characters from that book and their complicated, interconnected lives. And while going forward well into the future, there is also plenty of additional backstory for some of the main characters. But, after the fascinating shift to historical fiction in Manhattan Beach, and despite the new thematic concerns, this still feels like a backward step.

I loved this book since the first pages and it was a sort of epiphany as I discovered a great author.
It's a very dense and intense book, there's plenty of food for thought and there's a lot of story.
Everything works and I can find no fault: storytelling, style of writing, character and plot development.
I will surely read the other books by this author.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I’m a bit lost for words for this immense book, and can’t get much further than ‘Wow, Jennifer Egan’s brain.’

The incredible range of socio-cultural-tech material on which she effortlessly philosophises would be an achievement in any conventional novel. But the form puts it in a league of its own. It’s the same linked stories method as ‘A visit from the goon squad’ but even more ambitious - switching between past and near-future, and with even more characters. If that wasn’t enough, there’s a fascinating Philip K Dick-type scenario at the centre of the narrative, namely a new technology for externalising the unconscious and memories in an online mass consciousness. Phew.

It’s a complex and demanding read, in a range of forms, with multiple interwoven narratives and themes that can be hard to follow. Assiduous readers might wish to diagram all the relationships and narrative connections to keep track. Or, as I did, they might just abandon themselves to the thrill of the ride, and marvel at Jennifer Egan’s amazing brain.