Ethan and his five co-workers are marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive game-design company. There they wage battle against the demands of boneheaded marketing staff who torture them with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is being invaded by marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, global piracy and the rise of China. Everybody in both worlds seems to inhabit a moral grey zone, and nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly strait-laced parents or Coupland himself.

Distinctly odd - as is standard with Coupland's books. I could've done without the self-indulgent pages devoted to various nerdy mumblings (what publisher would allow an author to actually include pi to a million places in a novel? Coupland has obviously earned the right to be wilfully weird) but the story is brilliantly off-kilter, snappy, cynical and full of oddball trivia about life in the 21st century. A good read, just ignore the random pages.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

In the ladies' loos.

Just caught!