Same Same

the long version

The fiction debut from the LA Times bestselling author of What We See When We Read-- a novel of ideas set in a mysterious institute in the desert. In the shifting desert sands on the outskirts of a Middle Eastern city sits a mysterious Institute, where Fellows in every field of knowledge and endeavor under the (inhospitably hot) sun work on Projects and give Discourses(TM) and dedicate themselves to copying, cloning, replicating, and reproducing a world to which none of them seem to have any intention of returning. Same Same is Percy Frobisher's account of his tenure as a Fellow at the Institute, and his attempt to realize--or is it simulate?--his own audacious Project. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the real--so much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itself--Peter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist, and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.