Ambitious readers of all stripes, but particularly those who enjoy superbly written speculative fiction on par with Emily St. John Mandel's The Sea of Tranquility or Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, will delight in Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park (Personal Days), a work of skilled plotting, inventiveness, and artful, incisive humor.
Soon Sheen, Park's protagonist, is Korean American and a former writer who now spends his time as an employee of the menacing and ubiquitous tech company GLOAT. "I wasn't clear on what the letters in GLOAT signified. Possibly nothing. Or else many things: the phrase in question ever changing, apt for a company based on change.... Our aim was to maximize click rate and impression time by taking copy through multiple iterations, so that GLOAT could learn to do it better on its own. We were paving the way for our own obsolescence."
Sheen comes into possession of an unpublished work entitled Same Bed, Different Dreams by a Korean writer who may or may not exist. The writer, using the pseudonym Echo, claims to chart the history (past, present, and future) of a group called the Korean Provisional Government, whose members contain multitudes and cross paths in an intricate web of what may or may not be history. Sheen is mesmerized by the book, which goes missing and is returned, chapter by torn, muddied chapter, by his ailing dog--only to find that he himself is connected with it in unforeseen ways. A literary page-turner with a brain-teasing journey and a powerful payoff. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Washington