Passages

John Crowley's Engine Summer is a novel that feels less like a traditional narrative and more like a cryptic program written in a language only partially understood-a whispered incantation from a future past, delivered in prose both luminous and elusive. At its surface, it tells the story of Rush That Speaks, a young man journeying through a posttechnological world where memories and stories are the closest things to data, and where truth is a shape-shifting entity, woven out of voices layered like code commits in a sprawling, fractured archive.