An advertising copywriter searches for her missing reflection. An artist tries to sculpt clouds. A businessman fades into the atmosphere while an old man drifts over rooftops, his gravity broken. Eleven narrative strands fragment and reform to weave a story of other-worldly ailments and compulsions. As the befuddled narrators cross paths, their lives grow increasingly unmanageable. Told with wit and pathos, the linked tales are comical and strange, yet heartbreakingly familiar. These are the confessions you might hear at a 12-step meeting in a universe of fairy tales and dreams.

Selected by Brian Evenson as winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Prize

In a future short on fossil fuels and flora, the military compels its soldiers to carry houseplants wherever they go. To allow a plant to die is treason. Hershel Boyd is by all accounts a poor soldier, a frail, overeducated believer in the fading freedoms of a dying country. The narrator, a fellow recruit, makes it his mission to protect Hershel against all dangers. From the hazings of basic training to a botched invasion of the rainforests of South America, the two men must fight for a future where hope, not...