Zed A Novel

“[An] insightful, unsettling look at how technology impacts our lives. . .Kavenna has skillfully made our present feel like dystopian fiction.” USA TODAY

Named a Best Book of 2020 by USA TODAY 

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we do—before we do.

One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people?
     Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it.
     Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment—the ugliness and the beauty—perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present—and thrown back her head and laughed.

JOANNA KAVENNA grew up in Britain, and has also lived in the US, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic states. She is the author of several critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel Inglorious won the Orange Award for New Writing, and her novel The Birth of Love was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Joanna Kavenna's writing has appeared in the New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Spectator and many others. She was named as one of the Telegraph's 20 'Writers under 40' in 2010, and one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.