YOU

"YOU is a surreal, melancholy character study of a group of high school gamers who grow up to be semi-legendary videogame developers. Austin Grossman turned superheroes into socially awkward neurotics in his previous novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, and here he turns game development into a dangerous, often-deadly quest. As our hero tries to find a bug in the game he is desperately trying to finish, he is also working through the senseless death of his friend, who created the first version of the game. In part, the book is a stylistic exploration of videogame writing, offering us pages of object and character descriptons just as they would be written before being converted into the code of a game. But it’s also a coming-of-age story about how we never leave our fantasies behind. They become more real, and more powerful, as we age."