The Candy House

Jennifer Egan's latest is another SF adjacent novel, one that looks at social media and extrapolates our current obsession Facebook, Twitter et al into a near future where people make their actual memories available via tech, creating a collective shared consciousness that anyone can access. The book roams freely in time, showing us how such a thing came into being, and what a life in that world looks like. Like A Visit From The Good Squad, it's a series of linked stories that reflect and feed back on each other. The characters are all connected, some by blood and marriage, some by shared experience, and others more tenuously - probably not unlike your Facebook friends list. A good part of the fun of the novel is tracking these connections and working out how the characters intersect. It's fabulously readable, and Egan inhabits her different voices with aplomb. Marvellous stuff.