Jonathan Lethem, whose gift for reviving and reinventing genres has been so richly evidenced by Motherless Brooklyn and As She Climbed Across the Table, here takes the reader on a road trip through a post-apocalyptic USA.

Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork Wyoming is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in the projection booth in the abandoned multiplex movie house, trying to blot out his present, but unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant Kellogg reveals to Chaos over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth, in fact, is a little more complicated . . .

So Chaos gets behind the wheel of an automobile and, accompanied by a fur-covered female, sets out onto the empty highway on a journey to the edge of his American nightmare: in search of a missing identity and a stolen love.