Claiming de Wayke

What would you do if someone offered you the keys to a limitless reality?

Tayto is a saint—someone addicted to their VR halo. He’s uneducated, unmotivated, and loath to quit his habit and embrace the real world: the Wayke. When the mysterious Zeke Zohar contacts him, offering him a chance to be raptured into a VR paradise forever, it seems too good to be true. The catch: Zeke believes this chance hinges on them finding Tayto’s genius brother, and his plan involves journeying to Tayto’s childhood home, navigating the detested Wayke in the process.

For all the weirdness of the VR universe, it’s the real world that Tayto finds truly strange. His journey forces him to confront a gang, a cult, and the two great questions that addicts often face: Is it possible to come home? Is it possible to escape from it?

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In Claiming de Wayke, Colm O’Shea has created that rarest of literary creatures—a riveting page-turner of a book that also has philosophical depth and impact. Asking timely questions about virtual reality, social erosion, altered states, and the ugly endgame of unfettered capitalism, the novel reveals a mind-addled potential future that is both comically madcap and weirdly plausible. O’Shea has invented a language of his own, but Claiming de Wayke is embarked on a quest we all share... to fight through the world’s endless-seeming artifice and find something, anything, authentic. -David Hollander, author of L.I.E., Anthropica, and professor of fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

This book is the love child of Alice in Wonderland and Clockwork Orange, with Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, and a young Roger Zelazny standing as godparents. Luminous, savage, enthralling, this is not a book you will forget in a hurry.
-Alma Alexander (author of The Were Chronicles and The Second Star)