In Come with Me, Helen Schulman (This Beautiful Life) crafts a story about the desire to cheat the death of possibility. Amy Reed's tech wunderkind boss, Donny, has developed an algorithm that would allow people to explore their "multiverses"--alternative realities in which they made different choices and their lives played out in infinitely varied ways. Relying on a vaguely described combination of data aggregation, math and virtual reality, Donny wants to offer his customers "a personalized crystal ball" that lets them find out "what if." And he wants to beta-test it on Amy.
Amy is intrigued, but barely has the bandwidth for one universe, let alone an infinite number of them. She's keeping her family afloat on a part-time salary while her three sons struggle to thrive in the Stanford-dominated, capital-driven pressure cooker of Palo Alto. Meanwhile, her husband, Dan, an unemployed journalist, is trying to escape his reality in a more conventional way--by following a brilliant, incandescently sexy photographer named Maryam on an impulsive (and secret) reporting trip to Japan.
Overwhelmed and underappreciated, Amy gives in to the seductive pull of finding out what could have been, and what could have been prevented. Told from many shifting perspectives, Come with Me is more illustrative of the dramatically different universes that can exist within just one reality--or one city, or one family--than it is of technology's increasingly expansive role in our lives. It is a sharply observed, entertaining and occasionally heartrending novel that may help readers appreciate their own, singular, similarly flawed realities. --Hannah Calkins, writer and editor in Washington, D.C.