In his award-winning debut volume of connected short stories, Amsterdam takes his lead from the apocalyptic speculations that grew more ominous by the minute as 1999 drew to a close. We enter the post-Y2K world through the mind's eye of an everyman in the megalopolis, with free-floating carcinogens and immune systems gone wild. The book opens with our narrator as a precocious back-talking teenager, and the subsequent chapters/stories spin out over the next 20 years. In a later story, titled "Predisposed," our narrator is thrust by government dictate into the role of surrogate father to a teenage boy who resembles his younger self. It sounds like TV land, but soon we say good-bye to the known universe: "An only child with twenty-seven parental figures now, he even looks precious. Years of nighttime farming duties have left his skin bone white. To highlight the effect, he conned someone into bringing a eumelanin supplement back from the city...." Has this millennial vision brought us face to face with a Michael Jackson clone? That's the scariest thought of all. VERDICT The author, a native New Yorker transplanted to Australia, enters the literary world with a full-blown talent that can't be stopped. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Given that its nine linked stories are set in a postapocalyptic near future, the pleasure of Amsterdam's debut collection is surprising. Over the course of the book, just about every possible disaster assails the unidentified country in which the stories are set. Floods, drought, mob rule, and a virus that has one deranged character coughing up blood—each play a role in the disintegration of the world as we know it, and Amsterdam's narrator survives them all, first as a thief, later as a bureaucrat (which turns out to be not much different from a thief), and finally as a 40-year-old, cancer-ridden tour guide. Among the high points are "Dry Land," in which the narrator encounters a drunken mother and her daughter clinging to each other in a cataclysmic flood, though each is more likely to survive alone; and "Cake Walk," with a narrator who hides in a tree while a man infected with a deadly virus destroys his campsite. Though a couple of the later stories lack polish and punch, Amsterdam's varied catastrophes are vividly executed, while his resilient narrator's travails are harrowing. (Feb.)