A dazzling debut collection: nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and strangely familiar.

Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, these stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming more savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story-set on 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 of the grid, signaling the world's transformation and decline. The remaining stories capture the strange- sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny-circumstances he encounters in the no-longerso- simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state' ; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips. Yet, in each story, we see that despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity.

Things We Didn't See Coming is haunting, restrained, beautifully crafted-a stunning debut.