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Things We Didn't See Coming

3.45 of 5 stars 3.45 · rating details · 565 ratings · 141 reviews

It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.
The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain l...more

Paperback, 199 pages

Published by Harvill Press (first published 2009)

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Jan 22, 2013 Ed Bernard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Actually 4.5 stars, but decided to round up>
An interesting book structurally, this “novel” is actually 9 stories featuring the same narrator, each separated by a few years, each taking place in a increasingly dystopian future. We witness his relationship with his parents, his grandparents, his highly destructive girlfriend, and also see him move from job to job in a post-apocalyptic world – in one, he rides through the countryside on a horse, helping/convincing people to leave their homes as...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Madeline Knight-Dixon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam:

So I just saw on someone’s blog a list of dystopian novels they wanted to read. A recent revelation that I made was that dystopia probably needs its own subsection of the library now, because these things are everywhere. If you walk through the science fiction section of any library you’ll see easily 10 or 15 titles that are unknown, but everything this you would expect from the genre.

This book falls into that category. It follows one man through...more The Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam:

So I just saw on someone’s blog a list of dystopian novels they wanted to read. A recent revelation that I made was that dystopia probably needs its own subsection of the library now, because these things are everywhere. If you walk through the science fiction section of any library you’ll see easily 10 or 15 titles that are unknown, but everything this you would expect from the genre.

This book falls into that category. It follows one man through his entire life as the world falls apart around him, starting when he’s a child all the way to the end. Throughout that time, the world goes through not one, but serveral changes. From brutal and savage, to somewhat stable, back to savage, into something more spiritual. Nothing is concretely described, (as is the tradition with dystopian novels that I think people don’t realize going into it) which I enjoy as it leaves a lot up to the reader to figure out and decide how the world is structured.

I will say what I didn’t like about the novel was the way it’s structured. It’s told as short stories that loosely connect, very Hemingway of the author but with a solid knowledge that they’re always talking about one guy. At first I liked this, it allowed for large jumps through time so we could see more of how the world worked without having to slog through 100 pages. However it made it hard to stay engaged. I found myself putting it down, forgetting about it for a couple weeks, only to pick it back up and remember how much I liked it. It took me a while to get through because of it.

All in all, it is brilliant in its simplistic, yet controlled style at describing all the depravity humans are capable of in dire circumstances. Theft, sexual deviance, loss of morals only to regain them again… I found it honest and realistic in a genre that usually veers far from those two things. If you can read it in a couple of sittings I think it would be more effective though.(less)

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May 07, 2012 S'hi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to S'hi by: the writer? heard speaking at MWF 2010

Inspired to read Steven Amsterdam’s prize winning novel again after hearing him at a recent reading. A master of succinct images which suddenly propel the action in new directions, that evening Steven transformed the energy of the room in an instant.

Things We Didn’t See Coming was originally a series of short stories. The publishers were ready to try something different, and liking Steven’s writing suggested that he bring the pieces together a little more to make a single narrative through what...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This summer, I had a bit of a run-in with post-apocalyptic literature; fun, right?

In the end, I wound up with a slight case of apocalyptic hysteria and couldn't sleep for several weeks - but, on the plus side, I also discovered this little gem of a book. As all of the year end "best of" lists emerge, I've been surprised that it hasn't shown up even once, because it was really nicely done. Using a series of interlinked short stories (which is not, in my opinion, an easy route to take), Amsterdam...more

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Dec 18, 2010 Traci rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In an attempt to take a break from my normal reading fare (i.e., more paranormal stuff), I decided to run through my I-want-to-read-this-someday-down-the-road list and see if anything looked good. This seemed to fit the bill - definitely not supernatural, and short to boot. I placed my reserve and when it came, I checked it out thinking I might eventually get around to it.

It didn't take long to start reading it, and once I started, I found I couldn't stop. There's something about this book, some...more In an attempt to take a break from my normal reading fare (i.e., more paranormal stuff), I decided to run through my I-want-to-read-this-someday-down-the-road list and see if anything looked good. This seemed to fit the bill - definitely not supernatural, and short to boot. I placed my reserve and when it came, I checked it out thinking I might eventually get around to it.

It didn't take long to start reading it, and once I started, I found I couldn't stop. There's something about this book, something that compelled me to keep reading. It's an odd format - nine "stories" that are more like snapshots of the narrator's life at different times over 30 years. Luckily, the stories appear sequentially, so there's no jumping around in time. But it's still strange to read about someones life like this; I found myself wondering how he got to where he was in each story. It's stories without background, if you will. And you never do learn the name of the narrator, so he could be just about anyone.

The scenes follow the narrator after the world takes a complete nose-dive on New Year's Eve, 1999. Remember the whole Y2K fiasco? Well, in this book, the fearful were absolutely right to worry - the planet evidently cannot survive the transition to the year 2000. The narrator is taken to his grandparents house by his parents, his mother being a naysayer and his father being a true believer. Obviously, this will cause problems down the road for his parents, and indeed, when he visits them in later stories, they are no longer together. His grandparents make an appearance again in one of the stories (one of the more touching entries), along with crazy weather, the flu-like plague (which reminded me quite of bit of Stephen King's Captain Trips illness from "The Stand"), and other challenges the narrator faces.

It's a strange work, but the point is, it works. I thought the character development was quite good considering that it's not done in the typical fashion; I wanted to find out if the narrator was going to survive. I also thought some of the peripheral characters were interesting and well-done, too, no small feat when they make such short appearances. It's a good little book, and I truly believed that some of this gloom-and-doom world could happen. I'm curious to see what Amsterdam does next. (less)

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Oct 16, 2010 Boyd rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure what makes this little Book of Nightmares a story collection rather a novel, other than the fact its author says so. There's nothing particularly discrete about its subsections, and I can't see any one of them standing up all that well on its own.

But that's a tiny quibble about a very interesting, if uneven, book. The prose is one of its real pleasures: it's economical without being either flat or--like THE ROAD--ostentatiously stark. It's also, and not infrequently, witty, largely...more

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Oct 03, 2010 Simon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting and not quite what I expected. The book follows an unnamed narrator through nine self-contained episodes, starting in the year 2000 and ending (as far as I could work out) in c. 2040. It’s a short book and the prose is spare so rather than a detailed and complicated vision of mankind’s immediate future we get some vivid passages on a first-person scale with a strong sense of environmental and social disorder lurking behind and alongside the narrative(s). This includes some frightenin...more Interesting and not quite what I expected. The book follows an unnamed narrator through nine self-contained episodes, starting in the year 2000 and ending (as far as I could work out) in c. 2040. It’s a short book and the prose is spare so rather than a detailed and complicated vision of mankind’s immediate future we get some vivid passages on a first-person scale with a strong sense of environmental and social disorder lurking behind and alongside the narrative(s). This includes some frightening visions of flood, fire and plague.

But – and I think this is what surprised me – I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. There are deaths, and death is always there, but the nine episodes don’t seem to be on a trajectory towards collapse. The State remains intact and interventionist, and although the book describes an awful and unjust future this isn’t the heartbreaking, hopeless chaos of ‘The Road’. At least not in 2040, anyway. So I’m not sure if this is an optimistic or a pessimistic novel, but it’s probably all the more thought-provoking because of that.

One quick aside, and that’s to wonder whether this counts as ‘genre fiction’ and if so, what genre. ‘Science fiction’ always used to be the catch-all term to describe anything that looked ahead to an alternative future but clearly the ‘science’ bit is problematic as it suggests an emphasis on technology, an emphasis that’s not always there in this kind of pre- or post-apocalyptic novel and almost never there in the ‘literary’ apocalyptic novel. So is this just ‘future fiction’? Is that a term?

(Actually, I thought there was a bit of uncertainty in this novel regarding technology. There are information networks, advanced ‘meds’ and a ‘jet’ features in one episode but we’re told in another that robotics ‘fizzled’. I’m not sure that rings true. Either there’s some part of future society that’s wealthy and coherent enough to support all the interesting advanced technologies or there isn’t and we shouldn’t see any of them. I suspect the author is displaying his ‘literary’ sensibilities here and was worried that the book would be labelled ‘science fiction’ if he had robots clanking around in every scene).

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Apr 19, 2010 Schnaucl rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: april, fiction, post-apocalyptic, library, read_2010

Three and a half stars.

This is a first novel, but I would not have guessed that if I hadn't read the book jacket. The writing is polished with a nice flow.

The book is really snapshots of the main character's life as the world goes to hell (and maybe rebuilds?). The first chapter takes place when the main character is 10 years old and his father is convinced that Y2K will destroy civilization as we know it so he bundles up his family and drives them to his wife's parents' farm in the country on N...more Three and a half stars.

This is a first novel, but I would not have guessed that if I hadn't read the book jacket. The writing is polished with a nice flow.

The book is really snapshots of the main character's life as the world goes to hell (and maybe rebuilds?). The first chapter takes place when the main character is 10 years old and his father is convinced that Y2K will destroy civilization as we know it so he bundles up his family and drives them to his wife's parents' farm in the country on New Year's Eve. I actually thought that was a terrific start and I would love to see that premise made into a book on its own, or at least a longer short story.

The book then jumps ahead about 5 years and the landscape of the world has changed dramatically. Why? We don't know. We just know that it has. That's the frustration I had with much of the book. There are all these changes in civilization, government, environment, infrastructure, etc. and we're never really given an explanation for why that is. Did Y2K really happen? If so that sort of explains this next story with the character at 15, but why would it cause monsoon like weather which happens in a later chapter. And how are they making all these pills/medicines by the end of the book?

Anyway. The chapter where the main character is 15 is a beautifully told story that actually focuses more on the relationship between the grandparents he stayed with on New Year's Eve. That by itself would have made a wonderful short story.

The chapter with all the rain would also have made a wonderful short story.

The problem is that many of the chapters aren't quite long enough to be a short story and various characters appear and disappear without cause or explanation. The only way you know they're gone is that the narrator no longer mentions them in subsequent chapters.

I can't help feeling that Amsterdam took this disjointed approach so he wouldn't really have to explain how the world went to hell, the reader is just supposed to accept that it has. Nor does he really have to explore relationships if characters don't really stick around.

Still, it was an enjoyable read and aside from the fact that the chapters felt disjointed, the writing, pacing, and dialog were all very well done. (less)

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Feb 01, 2010 The Blurb Radio Show rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: past-books-and-authors

Steven Amsterdam's "Things we didn't see coming" is a series of scenes from a future where an event (only vaguely hinted at) has caused societal collapse.

We never find out the name of the central character who is the storyteller - beginning from the eve of the event, where he is a child - age unclear.

Each chapter is a new point in time, describing life in a chaotic world, with challenges ranging from lack of water, to ceaseless rain, to disease, to pestilence. There are times of luxury too, as...more

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Oct 10, 2009 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher, Pantheon Books.

Steven Amsterdam is a native New Yorker working in Melbourne, Australia. Things we didn't see coming is this ex-pat's collection of linked short stories in an alternate history where things after Y2k went a little...wrong. A

The protagonist is never named either, and we follow him and the world for years after Y2k's troubles (and more troubles in the course of the stories) have led to a post-apocalyptic environment, with cen...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Jesse rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: while-in-peace-corps

Got this little baby from a rad friend from Australia. It totally fit within my like of post apocalyptic, dystopian society genre. It is less depressing than The Road but more reality based than Oryx and Crake, potentially. It was a quick read, and at first I wasn't sure if this was a book of relatable short stories, or one longer narrative. The landscapes and scenarios change so much from one story to the next, but the narrator is the same voice throughout, an unnamed male, who ages from adoles...more

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Nov 20, 2010 Emily rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think I didn't get this book. The concept of moving through time so quickly for each chapter wasn't so much interesting as distracting. I kept turning the pages back wondering what happened in between and where the other characters suddenly went. What the hell happened in the years between chapter 4 and 5? How old is the narrator now? Who the hell are these people??

I ended up just floating through the narrative, not really interested but not totally disinterested. It was short and I got throug...more

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Aug 01, 2010 Skipper Ritchotte rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Things We Didn't See Coming is one of those wonderfully unexpected books, a wolf in sheep's clothing in a way. It's short and unassuming in appearance, only 200 pages long, and that with fairly large font. It reminds me of my favorite Vonnegut books in the way it packs every page with meaning; there is nothing extraneous, no frills and no filler. (Apologies to Vonnegut for my use of the much-hated semicolon there.) It's also not what you could call a fun, easy read, but is instead terrifyingly h...more Things We Didn't See Coming is one of those wonderfully unexpected books, a wolf in sheep's clothing in a way. It's short and unassuming in appearance, only 200 pages long, and that with fairly large font. It reminds me of my favorite Vonnegut books in the way it packs every page with meaning; there is nothing extraneous, no frills and no filler. (Apologies to Vonnegut for my use of the much-hated semicolon there.) It's also not what you could call a fun, easy read, but is instead terrifyingly honest and heartbreaking, yet hopeful, always propelling one forward to open the box that is the next story.

The book begins at the start of modern civilization's much prophesied apocalypse, on New Year's Eve in an alternate Y2K, with a nine-year-old narrator fleeing to the countryside with his parents. Each story jumps ahead in the narrator's life (often many years ahead) to the new reality of his situation, to the new world he lives in.

It reads like a novel in some ways; I forgot it was a collection of stories and kept expecting the threads of the previous chapter to pick up with the next one, since the narrator remains the same, and the story is linear, (albeit with large gaps in time). Eventually, one gives themselves over to not knowing what to expect next, which struck me as being masterfully pulled off by the author, as it mirrors the protagonist's unstable, chaotic life. In the end the threads of his life tie together, and the payoff was immense and illuminating for me. It brought me to tears.

The writing is spare, darkly honest, desperate at times, and yet there is the best of human optimism and hopefulness at its core. The story and the world does what the best of science fiction does. It warns, shows possible outcomes, is loaded with portents, but never preaches. It might not thrill some fans of adventurous science fiction, but it does have cross-genre appeal, and might just as easily be filed in mainstream or literary sections.

I do recommend this demanding, lovely little book highly.(less)

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May 29, 2010 Pete rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

It's a lighter post(sort of)-apocalypse.

There are some interesting elements to the book, for sure. The style of having a series of short stories that take us through the narrator's life allow us to see the re-crumbled society, some of the middle, and then the end.

There are some really good scenes in here, but if you're looking for a sort of action-packed apocalypse/survival thing, this isn't your best bet.

The two stars are only two because the book went into a bit of a romance thing that didn't...more

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Apr 23, 2010 Patrick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. What we have here is an interesting take on an apocalyspe novel complete with doe-eyed deers, picnics with chewing pine sapped barks, cooking rats, seeking refuge in sexual unions of more than one way and sweet sorrowful moments in hell upon earth after the collapse of society after the Y2K diaster.

Yes, people get killed, yes, people do vicious things, yes there are thefts, looting, and yes, like the Occan's Razor, there are stupidity and sorrow. In all this, the narrator lives his life and som...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Leonie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What I like most about this is the scale; the person by person day by day version of life after the apocolyptic disaster. There's no big shiny concept or plot. The concept of constant coping amidst battering or uncertainty, and how that shapes an ordinary person's life, is all that's on offer. I liked the cynicism and the occasional moment of moral panic that still came across as cynical to me. I thought the writing style was confident, but still could have really made the novel if it had been a...more

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Jun 27, 2010 David rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I finished reading Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming a few days ago, and I was very glad. The book is nine stories loosely set in a similar post-apocalyptic future, and most of them are quite downbeat, depressing, and cynical in their takes on human nature. Worse, the future that Amsterdam envisions is somewhere between statist and totalitarian, but the amazing part is that the people living in it don't rebel at all against it. The presumption is that all purpose and sense of morali...more

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Feb 11, 2010 Liviu rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010_release_read, review_fbc, read_2010, shorts, mainstream, t1_recommended_2010

From my FBC review,a discussion of the each story with the first sentence or so excerpted:

1:What We Know Now
"For the first time, Dad is letting me help pack the car, but only because it’s getting to be kind of an emergency."

The narrator at 14 on New Year's Eve 1999-2000 and the beginning of the "troubles". The one pure mainstream story, it seems a later addition for the sake of completion but the last story connects back here and illuminates it.

2:The Theft That Got Me Here
"The new pills se...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Ben Langdon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Amsterdam's collection of interconnected stories propel the reader into a future world where every new 'chapter' produces a new kind of dilemma ('thing we didn't see coming') for the world and for the unnamed narrator.

It explores dilemmas facing the world at large (Dry Lands), for society (The Theft That Got Me Here), or for the narrator on a personal level (Uses For Vinegar, among others).

We can learn a lot through this book, or at least, allow ourselves to contemplate the possible disasters...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Kirsty (Blatant Biblioholic) rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, dystopia, botns, fiction, short-stories

This was an interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre. It was advertised as a collection of short stories and is structured this way, however it is more of a novel that is serialised over the protagonist's life. I struggled with whether to rate this a 3 or a 4 as to be honest it's more a 3.5 but I settled with a 3 because whilst I did enjoy it, it didn't capture me.

It was kind of like The Road in that we don't actually know what happened for the world to end up like it is, and we don't ever...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Martin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I hate this book.
I loved this book.

I loved each separate chapter, each story was great. Each idea for an apocalypse, while not fresh or new was done in an engaging and exciting way. I love how it threw you into the middle of it all and left you to figure out what was going on.

I hated each desperate chapter and how the only thing tying one to another was the main character. Years would skip, characters would appear, characters would disappear, things would happen, places would change without so...more

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Nov 18, 2012 Tanner D rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: no-longer-owned

Really wish this site enabled half-stars. The difference between two stars (ugh) and three stars (this was good) can be expansive. This particular novel would be a 2.5; nothing ground-breaking but steady and with a sense of a negative reality dabbed with positive futuristic sensibilities. Books composed of connected short stories can be a chore when the final product isn't greater than the sum of its parts - especially when those parts range from ho-hum to mildly engaging. There are only a coupl...more

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Feb 17, 2010 Taffnerd rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, post-apocalyptic

Each section of this book is a snapshot of the world of the narrator. We first meet him as a young boy on New Years eve 1999, fleeing with his family in a Y2K panic. Next he is a teenager in a world where someting unnamed has gone wrong. He and his grandparents are Urbans who are not welcome outside the city; the Rurals have all the food and most of the land and want to keep it that way. Then, he is working for the government, relocating people who have been displaced by massive climate upheaval...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Blake Baguley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I couldn't stand the first half of the book. Each "chapter" ends on the same sort of unresolved and completely unsatisfying note that doesn't appear to be saying anything. But I did get more into it after halfway, just because I was curious to see where the protagonist would end up. I spent the whole book wanting him to grow a spine!! Like another reviewer said, the idea here was a lot more enticing than the actual end result story itself, and that's what kept me going.
There's some great moments...more

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Feb 11, 2010 Lisa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction

“They never saw it coming.” Often meant as a comfort, this statement carries with it the scent of ignorance — blissful, willful or otherwise. Should they have known? Should they have looked? Should they have asked?
Most of the people in “Things We Didn’t See Coming,” a sharp debut from Steven Amsterdam, not only didn’t see things coming, they refuse to see them once they’re here.
The book consists of nine separate but connected stories, all told by the same nameless narrator at various points in...more “They never saw it coming.” Often meant as a comfort, this statement carries with it the scent of ignorance — blissful, willful or otherwise. Should they have known? Should they have looked? Should they have asked?
Most of the people in “Things We Didn’t See Coming,” a sharp debut from Steven Amsterdam, not only didn’t see things coming, they refuse to see them once they’re here.
The book consists of nine separate but connected stories, all told by the same nameless narrator at various points in his life. The first story takes place on New Year’s Eve 1999, as the 9-year-old narrator is whisked to the country in a car packed with supplies by his panicky father, who, we later see, turns out to be right about the impending chaos.
When he’s a teenage delinquent, living where urban and rural are starkly delineated, he takes his grandparents on one last, now-forbidden trip to the country.
The rest of the stories swoop back into his life at irregular intervals, when he’s a wandering thief, a government agent, a member of a commune, a tour guide for the terminally ill.
The snapshots of society Amsterdam gives us are narrowly framed and sometimes blurry, but nonetheless show significant changes. The social order has not completely broken down, but has been upended as people are forced to deal with severe changes in climate, natural disasters, demographic shifts and rampant illness. But the stories focus not on the chaos of the future, the details of which are only roughly sketched, but rather on the actions and reactions of the people living through it.
There’s a lot of potential — both for drama and for distraction — in a dystopian future, and Amsterdam takes an unexpected approach by forgoing a narrative arc to focus on individual people and incidents instead of the larger world. He doesn't preach or present the stories as cautionary tales; he simply lays out the lives of a few people. He’s a keen observer of people, which makes the characters interesting enough for readers to overlook the lack of detail about the world we aren’t living in. As the narrator shifts from taking to giving to a balance of the two, he gets a lesson in human nature. People are stubborn and largely predictable, and like to look back at what was rather than ahead to what’s coming. (less)

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Apr 14, 2010 Katherine Granich rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm always wary of books of short stories. Maybe it's because I like to sink my teeth into characters and settings and plots, and sometimes short stories don't give you a chance, or they end just as you're getting invested and you're left hanging, wishing there was more.

So I read the first story in this book with trepidation. The protagonist, as a boy, is fleeing the city with his parents on the eve of Y2K. Tension is high. His mother is detached and complacent. His father is highly strung and...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Adrienne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, post-apocalyptic, library

A dystopian set of short stories, all with the same narrator at different stages in his life. The first story begins on the eve of Y2K, as the narrator's father flees the city with his family in case of impending doom. I imagine in this alternate reality, all the things we were scared of at Y2K actually happened. Another story seems to deal with the Avian Flu virus causing mass infections and death. Characters appear in multiple stories, so you are able to track how the narrator's life meshes wi...more

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Apr 02, 2010 Amy marked it as to-read · review of another edition

This collection of short stories was released in February and is definitely going to get some big press. The author, Steven Amsterdam, is a native New Yorker who moved to Australia in 2003. He is youngish and it comes through in the feel of these stories: one unlike any others I can remember. I’ve read many collections before, but often it seems they are told by an older ‘voice’, usually an introspective older man or woman. In the case of my beloved Tim Winton short stories, the voice changes th...more This collection of short stories was released in February and is definitely going to get some big press. The author, Steven Amsterdam, is a native New Yorker who moved to Australia in 2003. He is youngish and it comes through in the feel of these stories: one unlike any others I can remember. I’ve read many collections before, but often it seems they are told by an older ‘voice’, usually an introspective older man or woman. In the case of my beloved Tim Winton short stories, the voice changes throughout to different people and different age ranges. These however have a snarky young voice, a male narrator, and it spins things around quite a bit as the topics are different as well. The pace is fast and the humor is biting. Amsterdam makes visual pictures of a future Australia that are brutal and painful and heartbreaking.

In “The Theft That Got Me Here”, a young man who lives with his grandparents, one of whom is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is greeted with a surprise:

…Grandma opens the door and she’s fine. She’s standing on her own, not holding the walls, nothing. She’s been off the map for six years and now she’s looking at me like a professor. Not speedy and scared, like she was on the last treatment, but simply there, her old self. And this isn’t me on drugs. It’s her on drugs.

In “Dry Land”, Australia goes through a rain cycle that doesn’t end. For years. All that dry, dusty outback becomes a series of lakes, and the rain never stops. People are forced to evacuate, and while they try to hold off, leaving becomes inevitable. The narrator observes that “Despite all the feelings we think we’ve got for our loved ones and our attachments, when push comes to shove most people figure out how to travel light.”

The author blurb on the back states that Amsterdam is a psychiatric nurse as well as an author. I’m certain that his experience in health care has made him more aware of the more subtle layers of fear and anger, those that he exposes so well in this collection. It’s not in the big details that he reveals them, but in the little details, the little inflections and asides. An unusual collection that is a fun read from someone we’re going to hear good things about!
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Aug 28, 2010 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was one of those books where the topic and idea itself turned out to be much more interesting to me than the execution. This book describes a near-future alternative reality postapocalypse. Something in our very recent history turned out differently than it did in reality, and everything went awry from then on. It follows one man's progression through the years from childhood through middle age and he lives in this new postapocalyptic world, and how the world changes (chaos and famine, foll...more

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May 12, 2012 MaryMartin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: australian, fiction

This is local writer Simon Amsterdam's first novel and it's truly impressive. The novel follows an unnamed narrator as he comes of age in an alternate Australia wracked by natural disaster. There is torrential rain, glimpses of plague, pestilence, starvation and religious mania. The division between city and country is tightly policed by a mysterious body called The Central. To give more away would be unfair, all I can say is, read it!

Amsterdam writes in beautiful, spare prose, countering the bl...more

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“Nous sommes arrogants, stupides, nous manquons d’humilité face aux siècles qui nous ont précédés. Ce que nous appelons
« savoir », ce que tu apprends à l’école sur les fossiles et les dinosaures, ce ne sont que des petites idées. Ce qu’on sait aujourd’hui, c’est qu’on n’a pas assez réfléchi.” — 1 person liked it

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Things We Didn't See Coming

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