Player One - Tapa dura

"A work of genius." (Independent on Sunday)

"A tense, utterly compelling story." (The Times)

"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)

"An ease with the language of modernity that contemporary Great North American Novelists should envy. (That's you, Jonathan Franzen.)...Great fiction" (Independent on Sunday)

"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)

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.