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  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781446409312
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Player One





From the bestselling author of Jpod, Generation X and Generation A comes a dystopian Breakfast Club for the twenty-first century.

A real-time five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end.

In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species - and that there is no turning back.

  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781446409312
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

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Praise for Player One

A tense, utterly compelling story

The Times

A work of genius

Independent on Sunday

As always with Coupland, the ideas come thick and fast, they're quirky, often funny and frequently profound

Daily Mail

As an observer with a knack of coining memorable phrases he is as sharp as ever . . . Coupland's gift from comedy is evident in the combination of bathos and farce . . . Shows Coupland as a first-rate thinker on what technology in its present form does, and might do, to consciousness, identity and individuality

Times Literary Supplement

Enjoyable . . .The way Coupland moulds his fiction from the throwaway debris of North American popular culture is quite brilliant . . . Coupland has always been a highly compassionate writer, concerned mainly with the ways in which affluent people's lives are cheapened by popular culture

Scarlett Thomas, Guardian

The pulse quickens as his principal characters hunker down for some besieged truth-telling...Dynamic engagement is the real meat of this slim but provocative novel

Independent