Recently divorced, thirty-six-year-old Neill Bassett has got a lot of questions.
Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles - Why am I here? Who am I? - but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? and Now what?
He's about to get some answers . . .
By day, Neill is engaged in an extraordinary experiment: painstakingly helping to create what might become the world's first sentient machine, an artificial intelligence that is based on the personality of his dead father. By night, meanwhile, he is coming to terms with his own emotional shortcomings, reconciling his newfound bachelorhood with the unexpected attractions of a vulnerable but intriguing young woman called Rachel. So the question is: What does it take to be a real human being? and, more alarmingly, what if he succeeds?
Set in contemporary San Francisco, where anything goes (and regularly does), this recklessly witty, formidably funny, outrageously honest novel captures the exquisite agony of the most important relationships of our twenty-first century lives.
