Rainy plays bass guitar and lives, recklessly but blissfully, with his wife Lark, a bohemian booklover who introduced him to the pleasures of reading. When a shocking act of violence upends their world, Rainy flees from home in a cruising sailboat pursued by a madman. His journey—with its echoes of the myth of Orpheus and The Odyssey—assumes mythic proportions as he travels across a surreal near-future landscape peopled with feral children and crazed pawnshop owners. The contours of this dystopian North America are revealed only gradually, but the focus remains on Rainy, who finds a kind of joy in even the most desperate circumstances. Strange, gorgeous, timely, and ultimately full of radical hope, this is storytelling on a masterful level.