The Unknowns (Reagan Arthur Books)
You will not want to miss this event! Gabriel Roth has delivered a debut
novel that, to many, signals the arrival of the next New Big Thing.
Eric Muller has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem for half his
life. As a teenage geek, he discovered his gift for programming
computers-but his attempts to understand women only confirm that he's
better at writing code than connecting with human beings. Brilliant,
neurotic, and lonely, Eric spends high school in the solitary glow of a
screen.
By his early twenties, Eric's talent has made him a Silicon
Valley millionaire. He can coax girls into bed with ironic remarks and
carefully timed intimacies, but hiding behind wit and empathy gets
lonely, and he fears that love will always be out of reach.
So when
Eric falls for the beautiful, fiercely opinionated Maya Marcom, and she
miraculously falls for him too, he's in new territory. But the more he
learns about his perfect girlfriend's unresolved past, the further
Eric's obsessive mind spirals into confusion and doubt. Can he reconcile
his need for order and logic with the mystery and chaos of love?
This
brilliant debut ushers Eric Muller-flawed, funny, irresistibly
endearing-into the pantheon of unlikely heroes. With an unblinking eye
for the absurdities and horrors of contemporary life, Gabriel Roth gives
us a hilarious and heartbreaking meditation on self consciousness,
memory, and love.
Praise for The Unknowns:
"What a funny, moving, brilliantly cut gem of a novel. An ever-shifting
Venn diagram of love and logic, The Unknowns floored me." --author of Panorama City, Antoine Wilson
"The Unknowns feels at first like a very great and very funny
coming-of-age novel, about a high-school loser destined for Internet
riches. But then suddenly you realize you're reading something much more
powerful: a beautiful and painful story about the dangers of learning
too much-and about how little we can ever really know about other
people."--author of The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters
"The Unknowns is so staggeringly funny and smart that its depths and
sorrows, when they came, took my breath away."--author of Dare Me, Megan
Abbott
"Gabriel Roth's first novel is a warmly wry coming-of-age story and a
darkly funny-and darkly resonant-satire of one effervescent moment in
San Francisco's abusive relationship with technology. If Peter Thiel had
backed a character from Infinite Jest, he would have gone on to look
something like Eric Muller. A tender, comic debut from one of the
coder-novelists of the future."--author of A Sense of Direction, Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Gabriel Roth was born and raised in London and educated at Brown
University and at San Francisco State University, from which he received
a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. For several years he was
employed as a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He
now works as a writer and software developer and lives with his family
in Brooklyn, New York. THE UNKNOWNS is his first novel.
