Things We Didn’t See Coming

It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed tocapacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city ina fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions. The ensuing journey spans decades and offers asharpeyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boyjettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as ajourneyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love,larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture andimprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularlybad weather. In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always hasone eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shiftsmore drastically and more often than anyone would like t oimagine. “I’ll get fired.””No one will know.””Central will find out.””Anything named Central doesn’t even know what you looklike. I do, and I’m watching you to see that you make the right decisionhere.”He waved us through.