Hello, World!

Hello, World! introduces a high-flying, high concept debut from a major new voice that reads like if David Mitchell wrote Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. A perfect reality. A broken family. The secrets that will unravel everything. Aleta Seppala is living what ought to be an idyllic life with her husband and daughter—every preference accounted for, proof of what a well-crafted world can offer. But one day, she disappears without a trace, leaving a grieving family and community behind. Elliane Seppala grows up believing that her mother abandoned her. Her father, Ted, thinks his wife was taken, and he suspects his friend and business partner. Their misery and loneliness aren’t supposed to be possible, not here. Not in World™. World™ was created to be perfect, a virtual reality constructed as a shelter from the devastation of the real world. Enter your Preferences, say goodbye to your own reality, and plug in. Here, you can choose every detail. You can manufacture the right house, the right memories, the right life. If you hate rain, make every day sunny. You can banish mushrooms and pumpernickel bread from your world altogether, or even make all food taste like dessert. If self-doubt controls your life, you’ll become the confident person you never were. The only price? You must leave everything behind. No ties, no memories, no baggage. When you wake up in World™, you are free. When Elliane meets a mysterious stranger who claims to know exactly what happened to her mother, she discovers that World™ might be falling apart, glitch by glitch. As Preferences collapse and the increasing glitches threaten to destroy everything that matters, real and fake, Elliane is running out of time to uncover the secret that has clouded her heart for the better part of her life. Equal parts deliciously escapist and stunningly profound, Hello, World! asks what the human brain is capable of, whether we’re hard-wired to repeat our own mistakes, and what happens when we get everything we ever thought we wanted.