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Come with Me
Cover of Come with Me
Come with Me
Borrow Borrow

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, A New York Post Best Book of the Week

Recommended by Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Skimm, The BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep

"Mind-blowingly brilliant.... Provocative, profound and yes, a little unsettling, Come With Me is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a family, and though it has hints of sci-fi, it's so beautifully grounded in reality that it seems to breathe. Although it takes place over just three days, what's so fascinating is that so many lives, and many possibilities, are lived through it. Truly, it's a novel like its own multiverse."
— San Francisco Chronicle

From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.

"What do you want to know?"

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate's nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they've made have shaped their lives.

Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny's theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?

Amy's husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn't felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan's betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.

Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, A New York Post Best Book of the Week

Recommended by Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Skimm, The BBC, Southern Living, Pure Wow, Hey Alma, Esquire, EW, Refinery 29, Bust, and Read It or Weep

"Mind-blowingly brilliant.... Provocative, profound and yes, a little unsettling, Come With Me is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a family, and though it has hints of sci-fi, it's so beautifully grounded in reality that it seems to breathe. Although it takes place over just three days, what's so fascinating is that so many lives, and many possibilities, are lived through it. Truly, it's a novel like its own multiverse."
— San Francisco Chronicle

From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.

"What do you want to know?"

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate's nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they've made have shaped their lives.

Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny's theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?

Amy's husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn't felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan's betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.

Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

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About the Author-
  • Helen Schulman writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her last novel, This Beautiful Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She is a Professor of Writing and Fiction Chair at the MFA program at The New School. She lives in New York City with her family.

Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    September 3, 2018
    Schulman (This Beautiful Life) thrillingly probes the ways technology and its sometimes alarming possibilities shape a Palo Alto, Calif., family. In a town teeming with genius Stanford coders and “Silicon Valley royalty,” Amy Reed is at loose ends: she works at a tech startup founded by her college roommate’s son Donny; contends with her children’s misbehavior at school; and suspects that her unemployed husband, Dan, is having an affair. Running is the only way she relieves stress, during which she imagines different, less encumbered lives for herself. But after Donny launches Furrier.com—
    a VR service that allows users to shuffle through a catalogue of alternate realities (“What would have happened if I’d taken that job? Who would I have met?”)—Amy becomes a test subject, drawing the stuff of her daydreams frighteningly close to the surface. Meanwhile, Dan flies to Japan with his lover to document the nuclear wasteland of Fukushima, regretting having forgone a more daring journalistic career. As the Furrier technology advances—and a tragedy at the local high school shakes the family to its core—the family must assess what their lives are and what, refracted through the promise of technology and alternate paths, they might have been. Adroit and perceptive, Schulman weaves a deeply felt meditation on the anxiety and complexity of modern relationships.

  • Kirkus

    December 1, 2018
    A Palo Alto-set domestic drama with a touch of sci-fi: What if the results of one's life choices could be explored not only in daydreams, but with a virtual reality-type app that generates personal "multiverses"?Dan and Amy are raising a high school senior named Jack and much younger twins, Miles and Theo. Dan is a journalist who's been unemployed too long; his whole sense of self is crumbling, and he's about to have a midlife crisis involving an attractive reporter and a trip to Japan. Amy works for the 19-year-old son of her best friend back on the East Coast. The boy has started a tech company out of his dorm at Stanford, working on a system for exploring multiverses called Furrier.com (his grandma often told his grandpa she should have married the furrier) and using Amy as a guinea pig. Jack has a serious girlfriend who lives in Texas; they spend all their waking hours together via Skype and FaceTime, and she even has dinner with his family. The twins, known as Thing One and Thing Two, are both having issues at elementary school. Around these main characters, Schulman (This Beautiful Life, 2011, etc.) has brought to life a large cast of supporting players with intelligence and humor, even as the story veers pretty suddenly into tragedy in the final third. Even if the workings of the gizmo that allows the user to experience multiverses are never really clear or believable, the questions it raises are profound and engaging and they're woven into the "regular" part of the plot as well, with characters ruminating over the consequences of decisions past and present, great and small. There are a formidable number of elements crammed into this novel, mostly successfully--nuclear disaster in Japan feels a little off-track, while teen suicide clusters in San Jose are on the money--but Schulman is just such a good writer, and the things she's thinking about are so interesting, you'll stay with her right until the end.Richly imagined, profound, and of the moment.

    COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from October 15, 2018
    An astute comedy of manners with elements of speculative fiction, Schulman's affecting sixth novel (This Beautiful Life?, 2011) is touched with an awareness of the tragic potential of human choice. Silicon Valley mom Amy, breadwinner by default now that her depressed husband, Dan, has lost his job as a print journalist, works in a start-up run by Donny, a junior at Stanford. Donny treats Amy as a surrogate mom and enlists her to test out some cutting-edge software that allows users to experience the lives that would have played out had they made different decisions along the way. Dan, meanwhile, tries out an alternate future reality as he escapes secretively to Japan with an attractive transgender journalist, leaving Amy to cope with three kids who have their own sets of problems. Rummaging in comfortingly dense detail through the lives of Amy's nuclear family and those of whom they touch, Schulman uncovers parallels between Donny's program and the processes that lead to life-changing forks in the road in everyday life. Schulman's intriguing premise gives depth to this domestic drama. Adding to that, every sentence sparkles, even minor characters have full and surprising lives, and she pulls it all together in an elegant ending.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    July 1, 2018

    A Stanford junior and tech start-up genius, Danny has devised an algorithm aimed at letting people access their "multiverses," the realms where their life choices play out differently. Now he wants to test it on PR part-timer Amy Reed, whose out-of-work journalist husband is taking a risk of his own by traveling with glamorous photographer Maryam to meltdown-stressed Fukushima. Following the New York Times best-selling This Beautiful Life; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

    Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Sarah Lyall, New York Times

    "Smart, timely, and highly entertaining." — Sarah Lyall, New York Times

    "A rich, closely observed story.... Schulman has a gift for vividly tracing the fallout of the domestic realm .... Poignantly captures the wonder, as well as the cluelessness, of how we live now." — Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

    "The best-selling novelist continues to test the limits of "family" fiction in Come With Me, a high-wire domestic dramedy....In tart, emotionally intelligent prose, Come delivers social satire with that rarest attribute: a heart. A-"Entertainment Weekly

    "Ingenious... It's jarring, and a measure of Schulman's inventiveness and skill, to be reminded that what we're reading isn't satire; it's our everyday." — O, the Oprah Magazine

    "Gripping." — Esquire

    "Strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written.... Has the humor and wit, the careful eye for social detail and astute character development, that made her previous novel a bestseller." — New York Times Book Review

    "Helen Schulman has a knack for social-realist novels that put their finger on the anxieties of the moment.... Schulman's novel may be precisely located in the moment ... but this is also a book about larger issues like technology and attachment." — Vogue

    "Cutting-edge... tackles fate, love, and the ever-growing influence of technology on our lives." — Time

    "A little science fiction with a lot of domestic drama, tempered by humor and a deeply resonant story about love, desire, and the family ties that bind." — Marie Claire

    "Wise... Playful." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

    "Plays creatively with the universal question, 'What if?'" — New Yorker

    "Think: 'Sliding Doors' meets 'Silicon Valley.'" — The Skimm

    "An intriguing look at the road not taken as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged married couple whose paths have diverged." — InStyle

    "Intoxicating and dangerous." — Refinery29

    "A sharp yet compassionate glimpse of the ironic excesses and unanticipated tragedies of the Internet age." — BBC

    "Come with Me is an inventive and incisive novel about the way we live now and the way we might have lived. Helen Schulman is a gifted and generous writer." — Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

    "With wit and compassion, Helen Schulman explores what happened, what might have happened, and what could still happen in the lives of one family. Clever and sparkling, fascinating and tender, eerily resonant, Come With Me is a novel for everyone who has ever wondered: What if." — Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists

    "Helen Schulman has produced a darkly comic and oddly romantic story about multiverse theory, alternative lives, and the craziness of the tech industry. By turns amusing and provocative, this is one compelling novel." — Walter Isaacson

    "With her hallmark wit, authority, and precisely observed details, Schulman shows us the complexity of mid-life trials amid constant and immersive technology: the regret, the longing, and the undeniable wonder. A compassionate, astute, and irresistibly compelling novel." — Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others

    "Helen Schulman once again displays her gift for mining the human story from the overwhelming complexities...

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