UnWorld

A Novel

By: Jayson Greene

Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin, Cindy Kay, Imani Jade Powers, Andi Arndt

From the author of Once More We Saw Stars comes a gripping novel about four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy. Set in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur, the story challenges our understanding of consciousness and humanity.

Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the body of Cathy, a self-destructive ex-addict turned AI professor and upload-rights activist.

With UnWorld, Jayson Greene envisions a grim but eerily familiar near-future where all lines have blurred—between visceral and digital, human and machine, real and unreal. As Anna, Cathy, Sam, and Aviva’s stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of UnWorld reveal themselves with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?

©2025 Jayson Greene (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“UnWorld is a richly layered, deeply intimate novel that holds a mirror to the depths of our own loneliness and offers a meditation on how to continually love ourselves through a cascade of grief that changes but doesn’t end.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“Gripping, tender, haunting, and so gorgeously written, UnWorld is a staggeringly beautiful debut novel. With nuance and subtlety, with grace and deep feeling, Jayson Greene writes about the most ancient of human stories of love and grief, alongside the pressing, hypermodern concerns of the digital age, like artificial intelligence. On an idea level, on an emotional level, and on a sentence level, I was entranced.”—Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms

“UnWorld is a gorgeous, fascinating exploration of the tethers of love and grief. Jayson Greene invests artificial intelligence with a juicy, pulsating heart. There were sentences that made me shake my head in awe."—Samantha Irby, author of Quietly Hostile

DNF

Liked his memoir, was bored by this. I made it halfway through and gave up.

It's very character driven, very much focused on the characters' internal thoughts and neither interested me,