“This weirdly compelling tale feels like a creepy 'Twilight Zone' episode.”- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“With pitch-black humor worthy of Kafka, Gerrard’s second novel encourages us to pose this burning question: What are we hiding from ourselves.”- O, The Oprah Magazine A pleasurably speculative yarn about family and ethics.”- Kirkus Reviews

“An affecting exploration of fate and the clash of our private and public selves.ambitiously wrestling in the muck of big questions. razor-sharp alternate history.Gerrard's novel emphasizes just how desperately people want confirmation of their place in the world.”- The Washington Post “This is a wildly charming, morally serious bildungsroman with the rare potential to change the way readers think.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) And in this sprawling, snarling tragicomedy about accountability in contemporary America, the greater danger is that Adam Lyon’s apparatus may just be right about us all. It may be a hoax, but that doesn’t mean what Adam is selling isn’t also spot-on.

And Adam won’t jeopardize the privacy of his customers by alerting the police. There’s an undeniable pattern between specific epiphanies and violent crimes. But unlike them, Venter gets close enough to Adam to learn a dark secret. Like his parents before him, Venter is quick to fall under the spell of the device’s sweat-stained, profane, and surprisingly charming operator, Adam Lyons. So when Venter’s grandmother finally asks him to confront the epiphany machine and inoculate himself against his family’s mistakes, he’s only too happy to oblige. This stigma follows them when they move upstate, where Venter can’t avoid the whispers of teachers and neighbors any more than he can ignore the machine’s accurate predictions: his mother’s abandonment and his father’s disinterest. But, oddly enough, so might the device.Ī small stream of city dwellers buy into this cult of the epiphany machine, including Venter Lowood’s parents. This particular ad has been circulating New York since the 1960s and it works. It’s an old con, playing on the fear that we are obvious to everybody except ourselves. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users’ forearms. *A Most-Anticipated book of 2017 by The MillionsĮveryone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too. *Best New Science Fiction for Summer by The Washington Post

The epiphany machine david burr gerrard