The Egg Code

With astonishing scope, flair and originality, Mike Heppner’s debut explores our secret lives and most desperate impulses even as they are penetrated by a global web of mysterious provenance and dubious promise.

Few who live in Big Dipper Township have even heard about anything called the Egg Code; they’re busy enough as it is. At one end of this tiny Midwestern community, a motivational speaker starts choking on his own words, while at another, an impressionable dancer struggles to realize her recurrent dreams of flying. An estranged wife becomes a counterfeit folklorist, while an aging typographer is besieged by regret. And—in one household—a “living arrangements” salesman is harried to the verge of losing his livelihood, while his wife stage-mothers their talentless son and eventually decides to take destiny into her own hands.

Also nearby, however, is a lone hacker bent on destroying the demon among them all: a router, the Gloria 21169, that, along with thousands of others, trafficks in information from all the world over to comprise the Internet. But the Gloria, or the corporation that controls it, has taken command of the entire network, at a tremendous cost to this young man’s family and to the consternation of parties on both sides of the technological revolution.

The crisscrossing of these many lives reveals how much (if at all) these quantum shifts in our society have affected our hopes, behavior and prospects. As much Our Town as 2001, and as funny as it is suspenseful, The Egg Code is both a hugely entertaining novel and the announcement of a spectacular career.

Mike Heppner grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, received an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.