Stranger Beauty: A Novel

Set in a future that grows more plausible by the day, Stranger Beauty asks what traces will remain after a life has ended.

There are novels that describe consciousness and novels that enact it. Stranger Beauty is of the latter. With its narrative spun out of three notebooks, an embedded screenplay, and a final monologue delivered by an AI that has legally consumed a dead man’s life’s work, Matthew Gasda’s formally daring prose carries a powerful emotional resonance.

The architecture of the no...