Synopses & Reviews
With over 100 million players world wide, virtual games are more than just a niche community, it's phenomenon. Now comes the first novel set in the world of virtual gaming World Leader Pretend.Xeres Meticula is a failure. A casualty of the dot.com bust, he now lives in his parents' basement and spends all day on one pursuit, winning The Realm. Fortunately he's not alone. Joining him in his world is; Gek-Lin, an orphan in Thailand who spends her nights in an internet cafe; Dietrich Bjornson, a welder working in Antarctica; and Tres Rawling, a former Olympic skier for England whose career was cut short when an accident left him a quadriplegic; and many more. Together they communicate and connect, working to achieve virtual world dominance, but when tragedy on and off line occurs, can these real people trust each other enough to find the help they need in one another? World Leader Pretend is a provocative novel about virtual connection in the modern age that reads like Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night meets Indecision.
Review
"Store your copies of Infinite Jest in the basement. World Leader Pretend is this generation's Bible-slash-novel." David Bowman, author of Bunny Modern
Review
"A powerfully moving story of what it means to be human." Mark Dunn, bestselling author of Ella Minnow Pea
Review
"The prose style is vivid, with an edgy contemporary rhythm; the characters are deftly-drawn, and the book full of heart." David Rochester, author of Quotidian Vicissitudes
Synopsis
Xeres Meticula spends his life in his parents' basement, playing virtual games on the Internet, along with his online companions--a Thai orphan, a welder working in Antarctica, and a former Olympic skier left a quadriplegic by an accident--a group of real people who together must overcome the limitations of the virtual world to deal with tragedy. A first novel. Original. 25,000 first printing.
About the Author
James Bernard Frost received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and has worked as a journalist for Wired. His first book, The Artichoke Trail, won a Lowell Thomas award for travel journalism. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. World Leader Pretend is his first novel.