Girlfriend in a Coma

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