God is nowhere.
God is now here.
God is nowhere.
God is now here.

Cheryl Anway is "no longer a part of the world and still not yet a part of what follows". She was pregnant, but she isn't any longer. The morning she went into school to tell her boyfriend - well, secret husband, in fact - Jason, that they were going to have a baby was the last morning she spent alive.

It was a beautiful day in Vancouver, and the world had seemed "unbearably pretty" to Cheryl. She was sitting with her girlfriends in the school cafeteria as the gunfire started and they watched the three malcontents, students who had dressed up like duck-hunters, give death to their schoolmates one lunch-hour, before turning on them . . .

Ten years on Jason is the kind of guy you sometimes see, sitting in his car, staring out in silence at nothing in particular - with, sometimes, a dog at hand to indicate his ability to sustain a relationship. And his family is not one to fall back on for support: Jason's father loves what God loves, hates what God hates; his mother is lost to drink; his brother is lost to dogma.

Jason himself moves between blackouts and all-too-clear memories of the school shootings and their aftermath. But as he moves in and out of his own life, between body and soul, he and those around him allow the inimitable Douglas Coupland to give us in 'Hey Nostradamus!' perhaps his most soulful, piercing and searching story yet.