UnWorld

Anna's son Alex is dead, and she cannot stop asking whether he fell from the cliff or chose to jump. Her grief has no floor. Samantha, Alex's closest friend, saw it happen. She is the only witness, and she keeps going back to the same edge, turning over what she saw and trying to make it add up into something she can live with.

In the near future of Jayson Greene's novel, a person's sense memories can be copied into a digital being called an upload, tied to a human source known as a tether. Aviva is one of these uploads, but she has broken away and left her human behind. She is hiding something troubling, and for now she finds shelter inside the body of Cathy, a former addict who still courts her own destruction and who now teaches AI and campaigns for the rights of uploads.

As the four women's stories move closer and finally collide, the book turns into an inquiry that is both painful and strange. What becomes of a person when grief breaks them apart? Where does love live if not in memory? And what makes something conscious, human or alive? Greene sets these questions in a world where the lines between flesh and data, human and machine, real and unreal have worn thin, and it is uncomfortably close to our own.

UnWorld is Greene's debut novel. He is also the author of the memoir Once More We Saw Stars.