Richly imagined and darkly comic, "Things We Didn't See Coming "follows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but treacherous weather, unstable governments, pandemic, and technology run amuck.

In this incandescent novel, a family s superpowers bestow not instant salvation but the miracle of accepting who they are.

Okay, tell me which you want, Alek asks his cousin at the outset of What the Family Needed. To be able to fly or to be invisible. And soon Giordana, a teenager suffering the bitter fallout of her parents divorce, finds that she can, at will, become as invisible as she feels. Later, Alek s mother, newly adrift in the disturbing awareness that all is not well with her younger son, can suddenly swim with Olympic endurance. Over three decades, in fact,...