Bug

Praise for Bug:

“Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori’s Bug is interested in the way personhood merges with technology. The nameless narrator here is a deaf, hyperactive 10-year-old…. BUG is an AI and he solidifies the bond with the narrator by hacking into the web to play dirty tricks on their enemies. Mr. Sartori portrays the pair as unlikely kindred spirits, restlessly brilliant social outcasts who feel trapped within their bodies (or hardware, as it were). The novel’s language is brainy and technical yet inflected by childhood naiveté, a high-wire act that translator Frederika Randall superbly conveys…. Though its backdrop is dystopian, the novel is always on the side of erring humanity. Between BUG and the young narrator, only one has a conscience and an ability to love.”

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Full of colorful characters, tender relationships, and satirical high jinks, it chronicles the struggles and small victories of a family, led by a bee-keeping Buddhist matriarch, that lives in a chicken coop. The novel’s finest achievement may be the voice (which Randall pitches beautifully in English) and perspective of its unnamed ten-year-old narrator…. The bitter undertow of Sartori’s sweet fable, then, is the real global crisis of the natural world, which is also our crisis.”

—Geoffrey Brock, New York Review of Books

“One of the great works written thus far about the Anthropocene—and I say ‘thus far’ because, frankly, I can’t wait to see what Sartori will do next.”

—Jim Hicks, The Massachusetts Review

“A witty tale of family resilience and a dangerous, homemade AI bot…. the characters’ antics escalate in inventive and unexpected ways. This is worth a spin.”

—Publishers Weekly

“So many things happen simultaneously in Bug that, with any other writer, this kind of chaos would veer completely out of control (like a rapidly-developing AI consciousness, perhaps?). Sartori, though, juggles it all with calm, confident hands to the very end, producing what is now one of my favorite books of all time, whether speculative or not.”

—Rachel Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation

“Sartori's Bug is a study in quirkiness, but it is founded upon a serious and complex substratum…. [Underneath] all of the entertaining commotion is an investigation into the relationship of words, signs, feelings, and thoughts, as well as a cautionary tale of artificial intelligence running amok.... Bug is a worthwhile adventure cast in the melded whimsy and substance characteristic of Sartori's work.”

—R. P. Finch, PopMatters

“The prose is lively, intense, and full of perceptive similes. The boy’s voice is unique and memorable as he records his daily adventures at school and at home…. Whether real or imagined or both, the boy’s adventures show him to be resilient, vulnerable, caring, and inquisitive—but above all else, he is a neglected child who wants his mother back.”

—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

“With wry attention to the gorgeous frailty of human behavior and a wicked sense of humor, Sartori brings us a family that is utterly unremarkable and unforgettable. Living in a chicken coop as his family goes through emotional and financial turmoil, the narrator, a ten-year-old boy, pulls the reader into his head. When language fails him (‘...words lend themselves without restraint to confecting colossal lies, you might even say they enjoy it.’), he turns to an unpredictable online friend. With the same messy heartbeat he gave us in I Am God, Sartori's newest novel is pure delight.”

—Shawn, Mara, and Marisa, Chapter One Book Store (Hamilton, MT)