A Time Out New York Best Book of the Year Named one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35 by the National Book Foundation Includes an Author Interview and Discussion Questions A lethal strain of virus vanishes from a lab in Washington, D.C., unleashing an epidemic--and the world thinks Lucy Clark's father is to blame. The plague may be the least of Lucy's problems. There's her mother, Isifrid, a peddler of high-end hatwear who's also a crackhead; her twelve-year-old half sister, Hannah, obsessed with disease and Christian fundamentalism; and Lucy's lover, Stanley, who's hell-bent on finding a womb for his dead wife's frozen eggs. Finally, there's Lucy herself, who tries to surmount her drug addiction and keep her family intact in this brilliant novel about survival and recovery, opportunity and apocalypse, and, finally, love and faith in an age of anxiety.

Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon, and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely, for his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in ten years. Esme is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all their lives forever.

Meet Phil Snyder: new father, nursing assistant at a cutting-edge biotech facility on Staten Island, and all-around decent guy. Trouble is, his life is falling apart. His wife has betrayed him, his job involves experimental surgeries with strange side effects, and his father is hiding early-onset dementia. Phil also has a special talent he doesn't want to publicize--he's a mind reader and moonlights as Brainstorm, a costumed superhero. But when Phil wakes up from a blackout drunkand is confronted with photos that seem to show him assaulting an unknown woman, even superpowers won't help him. Try as he might, Phil can't remember that night, and so, haunted by the need to know, he mind-reads his way through the lab techs at work, adoring fans at Toy Polloi, and anyone else who gets in his way, in an attempt to determine whether he's capable of such violence.