ANYONE by Charles Soule Official Blog Tour, Excerpt & #giveaway @JeanBookNerd @CharlesSoule @TTCBooksandmoe ~ '

Imprint: Harper Perennial

On Sale: 12/03/2019

Pages: 432

List Price: 21.99 USD
ISBN: 9780062890634

ISBN 10: 0062890638

Praise for ANYONE

“(Anyone) is fast-paced and suspenseful. Soule’s uncomfortable vision of the future will please readers of cutting-edge speculative fiction. ” —Publishers Weekly

“With his second novel, Anyone, Charles Soule establishes himself as an author that readers of speculative fiction will love for years to come. The book will leave you thinking about gender, power, and what it means to be human for long after the final chapter.” —Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes That Fought Them

“Soule has wrapped a sharp, prescient investigation of the human mind inside a breakneck thriller that will have you riveted until the very last twist. Anyone is truly a book for everyone.” —Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

“I spent much of my childhood inside DARPA, where my father was Deputy Director, and this book captures the imagination and double-edged sword of our greatest scientific leaps. The same technology that can cure the world’s ills might also cause us to spiral into our own greed, selfishness, and vanity. Charles Soule’s Anyone is a remarkable, consequential novel and a terrifying wake-up call.” —Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Anyone is an intense, superbly crafted, edge of your seat thrill ride. I loved the two slowly converging storylines, not to mention the most dedicated, hardcore character I’ve read in a long, long time. Who would you be if you could be anyone? I’d really like to be Charles Soule and have written this book.” —Sylvain Neuvel, author of Sleeping Giants

“An imaginative, time-fragmented thriller about the bitter and potentially deadly consequences of body-snatching. Readers won’t feel that they’re on the edge of their seats as much as they’re on a balance beam above a pit of lava while trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube.” —Kirkus Reviews

Charles Soule brings his signature knowledge—and wariness--of technology to his sophomore novel set in a realistic future about a brilliant female scientist who creates a technology that allows for the transfer of human consciousness between bodies, and the transformations this process wreaks upon the world.

Inside a barn in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a scientist searching for an Alzheimer’s cure throws a switch—and finds herself mysteriously transported into her husband’s body. What begins as a botched experiment will change her life—and the world—forever…

Over two decades later, all across the planet, “flash” technology allows individuals the ability to transfer their consciousness into other bodies for specified periods, paid, registered and legal. Society has been utterly transformed by the process, from travel to warfare to entertainment; “Be anyone with Anyone” the tagline of the company offering this ultimate out-of-body experience. But beyond the reach of the law and government regulators is a sordid black market called the darkshare, where desperate “vessels” anonymously rent out their bodies, no questions asked for any purpose - sex, drugs, crime... or worse.

Anyone masterfully interweaves the present-day story of the discovery and development of the flash with the gritty tale of one woman’s crusade to put an end to the darkness it has brought to the world twenty-five years after its creation. Like Blade Runner crossed with Get Out, Charles Soule’s thought-provoking work of speculative fiction takes us to a world where identity, morality, and technology collide.

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Excerpt from ANYONE...

CHAPTER 2

CHINATOWN, NEW YORK

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

THIS IS THE THING YOU DO NOT DO, ANNAMI THOUGHT.

This is shooting up heroin. This is hooking up with your sister’s husband. This is cutting your wrists and swimming with sharks.

She was lying on a flash couch in a darkshare den, about to let a stranger occupy her mind. This would last for two hours. During that time, Annami would be unaware, and her rider could use her body for whatever he or she wanted, anything at all. Drugs, sex, crime… anything. Traffic on the darkshare was unregistered, so no one would know Annami was not in her prime while these things occurred. If her rider murdered someone during the share, that landed on her. She would never know who the client was, and the client would never know anything about her.

That was the darkshare.

Annami was young, healthy, strong, beautiful. This was her first run, and her rate was five thousand dollars per hour. Over time, perhaps that number would go down, depending on what darksharing did to her.

She glanced at Mama Run, the darkshare den’s proprietor, standing next to the couch.

“You ready?” Mama said. “Client is good to go.”

Annami thought about the life she had created for herself. She had an apartment on Staten Island; she had a good job; she had friends. She had an uncracked pint of lemon gelato in her freezer. Or, hell, it was Saturday night. She could stand up from the flash couch, leave, message Bea or Gilbert or anyone, really, and meet up and let tonight just drift away, a near miss.

But created really was the word for what she had. The apartment, the job, the friends—all fiction; a careful, layered composition Annami had constructed over many years. It was both a smokescreen—to hide from Hauser, Bleeder, and anyone else who might be hunting her—and a means to gather intelligence on her enemies. She was a spy, a saboteur, a deep-cover agent alone behind enemy lines.

Her whole life was a story. It was time to write the ending. But to do that, she needed to make half a million dollars—at least—in a little over a month. The darkshare was the only way.

Mama Run’s smile faded just a bit—the woman was getting impatient. She knew it was Annami’s first darkshare and was considerate of that fact, to a point, but she was, after all, running a business.

Annami set aside the costume of her life, the happy, smart woman in her twenties who worked hard and fit into the world around her. She let her true self rise to the surface: one of the few people who knew the truth behind the lie of the world, and the only one who seemed to want to make it right.

She could do anything. Whatever it took. From this moment on, she was steel. She was tough as hell.

“I’m ready,” Annami said. “Go ahead.”

Mama Run nodded, her smile resurfacing. She lowered the hood over Annami’s head.

“Okay,” she said. “Client’s in the queue. Just be a minute. Remember: three purple peacocks—”

“In a pinnace,” Annami said. “I remember.”

“Only just in case,” Mama’s voice said. “You won’t need it. Everything will be fine.”

Annami stared at the interior of the flash hood, its holo-panels glowing with the dull green of standby mode. The darkshare ran on its own closed-loop networks—necessary to guarantee anonymity on both sides. Not like the lightshare, which registered everything, from flash patterns to transfer duration to names of traveler and vessel. That’s why it was safe. Why it made the world go ’round.

She took a breath, held it. When she was little, she’d gone to an amusement park in Ohio called Cedar Point. They had a roller coaster called the Magnum, the tallest in that part of the country. It began with a steep, slow climb, what seemed like a mile in the air, before a fall so intense, so fast… she’d held her father’s hand the whole time, clutching so hard it hurt her, never mind what it must have done to her poor dad.

She had no one’s hand to hold now, so she held her own.

For you, she thought. I’m doing this for/

Photo Credit: Marc Lemoine

Charles Soule is a Brooklyn, New York-based novelist, comic book writer, musician, and attorney. While he has worked for DC and other publishers, he is best known for writing Daredevil, She-Hulk, Death of Wolverine, and various Star Wars comics from Marvel Comics (Darth Vader, Poe Dameron, Lando and more), and his creator-owned series Curse Words from Image Comics (with Ryan Browne) and Letter 44 from Oni Press (with Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque.)

His first novel, The Oracle Year, about a man who can see the future and way this ability changes the world, will be released in April 2018 by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins.

WEBSITE: https://www.charlessoule.com/
TWITTER: @CharlesSoule
GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1641284.Charles_Soule
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/charlessouleauthor/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/charlesdsoule/