'Se Dio prendesse forma umana e morisse, cosa succederebbe al mondo e ai suoi abitanti?' Parte da questa premessa Ron Currie per dare vita a uno dei libri più crudi e illuminanti della narrativa americana degli ultimi anni. Dio si è incarnato nel corpo di una giovane donna del Sudan: quando questa viene uccisa, lui muore con lei. La notizia della morte di Dio inizia presto a fare il giro del pianeta e a suscitare le reazioni più disparate. C'è chi inizia ad adorare i bambini e chi i cani, chi fa cose ben più strane o feroci. Messa di fronte all'evidenza che non c'è più un'autorità superiore a regolare i conflitti e ad assumersi responsabilità e colpe, l'umanità viene irrimediabilmente trasformata, pur rimanendo stranamente familiare. Combinando humour nero e grandi domande esistenziali, Currie mette il lettore davanti a uno specchio deformante, che finisce paradossalmente per restituire una realtà molto simile agli assurdi tempi che stiamo vivendo.

'Startlingly talented . . . he survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice all his own.' -Janet Maslin, The New York Times

In this novel rich in character, Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine in a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine. He also knows something no one else knows-neither his exalted parents, nor his baseball-savant brother, nor the love of his life (she doesn't believe him anyway): The world will end when he is thirty-six. While Junior searches for meaning in a doomed world, his loved ones tell an all-American family saga of fathers and sons, blinding romance, lost love, and reconciliation-culminating in one final triumph that reconfigures the universe. A tour de force of storytelling, Everything Matters! is a genre-bending potpourri of alternative history, sci-fi, and the great American tale in the tradition of John Irving and Margaret Atwood.

You alone know that the world will end thirty-six years after your birth. Do you succumb to nihilistic apathy? Use your singular knowledge to save mankind? To what end do you live your life?
While still in his mother's womb, Junior Thibodeau is encoded with a prophecy: in thirty-six years a comet will obliterate life on Earth. Born to a working-class family in rural Maine, he comes of age in the shabby-decadent eighties, a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine, all the while grappling with one question: Does anything I do matter? While Junior searches for meaning in a world only he knows is doomed, the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices - from sibling rivalry over the cable box to first love in grade school; from crazed misadventures in Chicago to an all-out attempt to cheat death itself. Junior's loved ones, too, reckon with lives that cast his existential crisis into sharp relief: his anxious mother; his older brother, a child cocaine addict turned pro-baseball savant; his exalted father, whose mortal illness summons the best and worst in his sons; and Amy, the love of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that might save humanity.
As our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from the planet, Junior's final triumph ushers in something else altogether - an astonishing outcome that reconfigures everything we thought we knew about his universe, as well as our own.
A coming-of-age tale, a love story, and a marvelous family drama, Everything Matters! drives to the human heart of these characters, and the indelible voices who narrate this American tour de force leave the reader exhilarated.

An electrifying debut from a provocative new voice in fiction that will remind readers of the best of Vonnegut

Ron Currie Â's guts y, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly combining outlandish humor with big questions about mortality, ethics, and human weakness, Ron Currie, Jr., holds a funhouse mirror to our present-day world. God has inhabited the mortal body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of his death soon begins to spread. Faced with the hard proof that there is no supreme being in charge, the world is irrevocably transformed, yet remains oddly recognizable.