Parasites Like Us: A Novel (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer for his 2nd novel, The Orphan Master's Son, but this debut novel is equally genius. Set in Johnson's home of South Dakota, the novel chronicles the end of society as we know it. Wonderfully imaginative and unique from the first page. It's easy to see the brilliance and promise of Johnson before his work was highly regarded.
— Beckett
Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer for his 2nd novel, The Orphan Master's Son, but this debut novel is equally genius. Set in Johnson's home of South Dakota, the novel chronicles the end of society as we know it. Wonderfully imaginative and unique from the first page. It's easy to see the brilliance and promise of Johnson before his work was highly regarded.
— From BeckettHailed as "remarkable" by the New Yorker, Emporium earned Adam Johnson comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle. In his acclaimed first novel, Parasites Like Us, Johnson takes us on an enthralling journey through memory, time, and the cost of mankind's quest for its own past.
Anthropologist Hank Hannah has just illegally exhumed an ancient American burial site and winds up in jail. But the law will soon be the least of his worries. For, buried beside the bones, a timeless menace awaits that will set the modern world back twelve thousand years and send Hannah on a quest to save that which is dearest to him. A brilliantly evocative apocalyptic adventure told with Adam Johnson's distinctive dark humor, Parasites Like Us is a thrilling tale of mankind on the brink of extinction.
A grim romp of a first novel... great ingenuity and bravado . . . an artifact of real ambition and originality. (The New York Times Book Review)