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Informationen zum Autor Carter Bays is the co-creator of the Emmy-winning series How I Met Your Mother . The Mutual Friend is his first novel. Klappentext “This is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that’s not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up. . . . A major accomplishment.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) From the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother , a hilarious and thought-provoking debut novel set in New York City, following an unforgettable cast of characters as they navigate life, love, loss, ambition, and spirituality—without ever looking up from their phones It’s the summer of 2015, and Alice Quick needs to get to work. She’s twenty-eight years old, grieving her mother, barely scraping by as a nanny, and freshly kicked out of her apartment. If she can just get her act together and sign up for the MCAT, she can start chasing her dream of becoming a doctor . . . but in the Age of Distraction, the distractions are so distracting. There’s her tech millionaire brother’s religious awakening. His picture-perfect wife’s emotional breakdown. Her chaotic new roommate’s thirst for adventure. And, of course, there’s the biggest distraction of all: love. From within the story of one summer in one woman’s life, a tapestry of characters is unearthed, tied to one another by threads both seen and unseen. Filled with all the warmth, humor, and heart that gained How I Met Your Mother its cult following, The Mutual Friend captures in sparkling detail the chaos of contemporary life—a life lived simultaneously in two different worlds, the physical one and the one behind our screens—and reveals how connected we all truly are. Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE Constellations What did the Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor? This is the problem with telling yourself jokes: Nothing's funny when you know the punch line. And I know the punch line because I know all the punch lines because I know all. I know all. I see all. These are the facts, and the facts make me all. Make me the storyteller. Make me the listener. Make me the campfire. Make me the stars. On a June day in the high fever of this century's messy teenage years, a man died in Central Park. He was walking to work, earbuds in, ambling through a shuffle of his entire music library, when he came to the bike path, which wasn't so much a path as a ribbon of black pavement winding through the greenery. He looked both ways and, seeing no one coming, started across, but then, halfway to the other side, a breeze reminded him his hair was getting a little long, so he stopped, right in the middle of the road, and opened the to-do list on his phone. He looked down into his hand, his thumb going doot doot doot, and somewhere between the fifth and sixth doot, a blue ten-speed bicycle came coursing around the blind and practically sliced the poor fellow in half. People ran over to help, but there was nothing they could do. The man's earbuds were still in, and as it all began to slip, the song ended and into the shuffle he went. Celestial strings lifted him, pulling him into the sky as Nat King Cole sang "Stardust" through a microphone in 1957 into the man's ears in 2015. The man didn't want this song, and his last impulse was to skip ahead but then he skipped ahead himself, from this world into the next, and the song went on, and "Haircu" is still on his to-do list. "I don't want to say it was the guy's fault," said Kervis later that day as he loomed over Roxy's cubicle in the City Hall press office, "but he was playing on his phone in the middle of the bike path. I mean, it's sad, but dude, come on." Roxy agreed it was sad. "Second one this year. And it's only June," he continued....
