On a snowy Saturday night in 1979, after making love for the first time, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil confides the dark visions she's been suffering to her boyfriend, Richard. Only a few hours later she descends into a coma. Nine months after that, she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard.

Karen remains comatose for the next 18 years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades, passing through careers as models, film special-effects technicians, doctors and demolition experts before finally being reunited while working on a conspiracy-driven supernatural series.

Upon Karen's reawakening, life grows as surreal as the television show. Strange, apocalyptic events begin to occur. Later, amid the world's rubble, Karen, Richard and their friends attempt to restore their own humanity.

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Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Germany and raised in Vancouver, where he still resides. Among his best-selling novels are Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Polaroids From The Dead, Microserfs, Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus! and Eleanor Rigby, altogether in print in some 40 countries. Coupland also exhibits his sculpture in galleries around the world, indulging in design experiments that include everything from launching collections of furniture to futurological consulting for Stephen Spielberg.

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Douglas Coupland's profile page

“His strongest novel to date.”

<em>People</em>

“...a message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism.”

<em>USA Today</em>

“Part Stephen King, part It’s a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X thrown in, Coupland’s immensely readable . . . novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium.”

<em>Booklist</em>

“To call Coupland the John Bunyon of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the...fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut...[A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play.”

The Washington Post

“... Coupland’s dialogue is flip and fresh.”

New York magazine