num_pages: 272
description: Station Eleven meets Never Let Me Go in this debut novel set in an unsettling near future where the dead can be uploaded to machines and kept in service by the living.In the wake of a highly contagious virus California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high rise towers the living cant go out but the dead can come inand they come in all forms from sad rolling cans to manufactured bodies that can pass for human. Wealthy participants in the companionship program choose to upload their consciousness before dying so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation creating a new class of peoplea command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will. Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate leased to a family of strangers. But when she realizes shes able to defy commands she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away searching for the woman who killed her. Lilacs act of rebellion sets off a chain of events that sweeps from San Francisco to Siberia to the very tip of South America. While the novel traces Lilacs journey through an exquisitely imagined Northern California the story is told from eight different points of viewsome human some companionthat explore the complex shapes love revenge and loneliness take when the dead linger on.
language: English
title: The Companions
publisher: Gallery/Scout Press