Hey Nostradamus!

From one of the most distinctive literary voices of our time comes a powerful, surprising, and deeply moving novel about random violence and its consequences. Douglas Coupland begins Hey Nostradamus! in 1988, with a school shooting in a quiet suburb of Vancouver. Then, with unflinching candor, astonishing empathy, and his trademark black humor, he chronicles the aftermath across the next 15 years. The story unfolds via a series of spellbinding, pitch-perfect voices: those of the teenagers whose ordinary preoccupations with sex and spirituality will never evolve past the fateful, shattering moment in the school cafeteria; those of the parents whose sudden exposure to their children's passionate underground world threatens their deepest convictions; and those of the unwitting, the people who come to know the survivors only later in life, and who will only ever have an inkling of what transpired. In Coupland's world, there is no making sense of such a tragedy. What he does in Hey Nostradamus! --brilliantly, unforgettably -- is to make sense of his characters' struggles to make sense of it; to show us their humanity as they wrestle with religion and absurdity, grief and grace, scalding anger and ultimate forgiveness.