Haunted by their friend''s illness, a group of young friends struggle to find meaning as the world collapses around them in this meditative literary novel.On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard''s girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan.As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven supernatural television series.But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen''s reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse."[Douglas Coupland''s] fantastical Girlfriend in a Coma . . . at times approaches a jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut. . . . [A] rousingly old-fashioned and genuinely spooky morality play." —Washington Post"A message of hope and a challenge to . . . cynicism." —USA Today"Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in what it consumes and not what it could achieve." —Library Journal