THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK

Nine years after the Fall, one man still broadcasts the weather.Every night at eight, Gerry climbs to a Manhattan rooftop and reads the overnight low into a city with nobody left in it. It is a ritual and a discipline and the only thing holding him together, and in nine years nothing has ever answered.Then something does - on the low end of the band, late, using his own sentences. Phrases he wrote in private. Lines he has never spoken aloud.What survived the Fall is not a plague and not an army. The city has been left to the factions that came after: the Machinists, who trade flesh for machinery; the Steriles, who switched their feelings off; the Echoes, who are voices in the tile of abandoned subway stations; and the Anointed, a religion built out of catastrophe by Tom, who was Gerry's closest friend before he became a prophet.Gerry belongs to none of it. He scavenges, he broadcasts, and he writes - letters to Tom that he will never send, a journal addressed to a reader who cannot exist, and unsent letters to a woman named Mira whose face he can see perfectly and whose last name he cannot produce.Then Mira walks up his stairs, nine years dead and entirely herself.The Only Living Boy in New York is a literary science-fiction novel about consciousness, grief, radicalization, and the machinery of memory - a mystery that gives up its answers slowly and asks, in the end, whether love and doubt and moral choice mean anything different if the one having them was made rather than born.The fourth novel from Eli Mercer, author of The Empty Room, The Receiver Species, and The Pilgrim and the Machine.