The Seam

New York, 2029. Artem Metanov — Brighton Beach kid, family lawyer, son of a taxi driver — loses his wife Vera to a brain tumor the machines swore they'd caught in time.

Four years later, a company offers him what grief always begs for: her back. Not a memory. A copy — her voice, her turns of phrase, her particular way of being afraid. All he has to do is decide whether the thing across the table is his wife, a product, or a crime.

That decision is the first case of a two-hundred-year life.

Because Metanov doesn't die. He litigates. As medicine cancels old age and the law scrambles to keep up, he spends two centuries in the courtrooms where the real questions of the next two hundred years get decided: Who owns a resurrected voice? Can a mind that lives in twelve bodies at once be a someone? Is a father measured in years — or in Saturdays?

For readers of Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, and Ted Chiang — a legal thriller that lands like literary fiction, in the voice of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who never stops sounding like your smartest, most heartbroken friend.