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Hystopia

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Hystopia

By: David Means
Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
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About this listen

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2016

At the end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. Any veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.

This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the 22-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.

©2016 David Means (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Heartfelt Veteran

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Critic reviews

"Hystopia is a thrilling novel - daring, immensely readable and also unexpectedly funny. David Means is that lucky (and brilliant) writer: a man in full possession of a vision." (Richard Ford)
"A riveting, hypnotic dystopia of Vietnam combat veterans during the (fictional) second JFK administration. Amazing writing - not for the faint of heart.” (Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America)
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