Synopses & Reviews
After making love for the first time, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil confides to her boyfriend Richard of the dark visions she's been recently suffering. It's only a few hours later on that snowy Friday night in 1979 that she descends into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to a daughter, Megan, her child by Richard, the protagonist of this disturbingly funny novel.
Karen remains comatose for the next seventeen years. Richard and her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory throughout the next two decades; passing through careers as models, film special effects technicians, doctors, and demolition experts, before finally being reunited on a conspiracy–driven supernatural television series.
Upon Karen's reawakening, life grows as surreal as their television show. With apocalyptic events occurring, Karen, Richard, and their friends explore the essential mysteries of life, faith, decency, and existence. Amid the world's rubble they attempt to restore their own humanity.
Review
"Part Stephen King, part It's a Wonderful Life, with a little of his own Generation X thrown in, Coupland's immensely readable new novel shows him scared of the future and sounding the alarm for the millennium." Booklist
Review
"[A] message of hope and a challenge to...cynicism." USA Today
Review
"To call Coupland the John Bunyon of his set would not be hyperbole, especially in light of his newest book, the...fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma, which at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut....[A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play." The Washington Post
Review
"His strongest novel to date." People
About the Author
Douglas Coupland was born on December 30, 1961, on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Girlfriend in a Coma reestablishes Douglas Coupland as one of the most talented, engaging and important writers of his generation.Profoundly moving, darkly comic, this eerily prescient novel exploring questions of faith, decency and existence is set against the backdrop of a society hurtling toward the end of the century.As People magazine so deftly put it, "His voice still resonates with the generation he named."
He is the author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God, and Microserfs.