Title
Overthrow: a novel
Files
Description
One autumn night, as a grad student named Matthew is walking home from the subway, a handsome skateboarder catches his eye. Leif, mesmerizing and enigmatic, invites Matthew to meet his friends, who are experimenting with tarot cards. It's easier to know what's in other people's minds than most people realize, the friends claim. Do they believe in telepathy? Can they actually do it? Though Matthew should be writing his dissertation on the poetry of kingship, he soon finds himself falling in love with Leif - a poet of the internet age - and entangled with Leif's group as they visit the Occupy movement's encampment across the river, where they hope their ideas about radical empathy will help heal a divided world and destabilize the 1%. When the group falls afoul of a security contractor freelancing for the government, the news coverage, internet outrage, and legal repercussions damage the romances and alliances that hold the friends together, and complicate the faith the members of the group have - or, in some cases, don't have - in the powers they've been nurturing. Elspeth and Raleigh, two of Leif's oldest friends, will see if their relationship can weather the strains of criminal charges Chris and Julia, who drifted into the group more recently, will have their loyalties tested and Matthew, entranced by the man at the center of it all, will have to decide what he owes Leif and how much he's willing to give him. All six will be forced to reckon with the ambiguous nature of transparency and with the insidious natures of power and privilege. Overthrow is a story about the aftermath of the search for a new moral idealism, in a world where new controls on us - through technology, surveillance, the law- seem to be changing the nature and shape of the boundaries that we imagine around our selves --Publisher description;"As grad student Matthew is walking home from the subway, a handsome skateboarder catches his eye. Leif, mesmerizing and enigmatic, invites Matthew to meet his friends, who are experimenting with tarot cards. They're experimenting with reading other people's minds, in telepathy. Matthew should be writing his dissertation on the poetry of kingship, but as he's falling in love with Leif he joins the group. In the Occupy movement's encampment, where they hope their ideas about radical empathy will help heal a divided world and destabilize the 1%, the group falls afoul of a security contractor freelancing for the government. Matthew will have to decide what he owes Leif and how much he's willing to give him. -- adapted from jacket"
ISBN
9780525560456
Publisher
Viking