An author of award-winning short stories (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) considers life, death, and what comes after in his debut novel.Jim Byrd is dead at the age of 33. And then, a few minutes later, he's alive again. This experience has some disturbing repercussions. The first is a surgical implant that reminds his heart to keep beatingwhich comes with a phone app to let him know every time his heart forgets. The second is that Jim has to go on living with the knowledge that his death wasn't accompanied by a bright light or an angel chorus. With a constant reminder of his own mortality in his pocket and evidence that the great beyond is an eternity of nothingness, Jim goes on a quest for hope and meaning that involves a paranormal investigator, experimental physics, and church services led by holograms. While this novel is set in the not-too-distant future, none of the issues that it addresses are new. Living with the knowledge of death is a universal predicament. Science fiction has been investigating the ways in which new technologies challenge our humanity since Frankenstein, and horror novels from Dracula to Jennifer Egan's The Keep have made use of the eerie qualities of phenomena like long-distance communication. Thomas Edison sincerely believed he could invent a "spirit phone," an idea that gets a 21st-century spin here. What Pierce does with all these tropes is make them boring. One of the experts Jim consults insists that nothing in the universe exists more than 93 percent of the time. This would be a more chilling observation if Jim, himself, was ever fully real. Nothing about himhis job, his friendships, his marriageseems worthy of sustained attention. The narrative is all just a lot of plodding exposition as Jim fumbles along. He has almost no inner life, which is especially unfortunate since he is not just the protagonist, but also the narrator. There's a second, related tale woven into Jim's story. It is, at some moments, slightly more compelling than the main text, but it mostly just makes a slow novel slower.Timeless questions. Tedious answers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Pierce's first novel (after the story collection The Hall of Small Mammals) is a free-spirited lark that questions how people live with the presence of death. After suffering cardiac arrest and a five-minute clinical death, 33-year-old commercial loan officer Jim Byrd is outfitted with an experimental defibrillator called a HeartNet. Soon after, Jim begins to notice strange things in the world around him: holograms of dead celebrities like Prince and Robin Williams begin to walk the earth, a strange Christian sect called the Church of Search comes to town, and Jim becomes obsessed with a staircase that may be a portal to the afterlife, through which a voice enigmatically chants, "The dog is on fire." His companion in these investigations is a young widow named Annie Creel, and, after the two impulsively marry, they find questions of life and death intruding on love. More subplots accrue, including the league of unscrupulous elders known as the White Hairs, the legacy of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, and rumors of a hacker targeting the HeartNet technology. Pierce's breezy style only partially saves the overlong novel from a lack of urgency affecting almost all of its numerous story lines. When it gels, the novel manages a rare and significant clarity about the effects of death on the living (particularly couples, aware that all romance is ultimately temporary), but otherwise it seems unsure which story it wants to tell. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Small-town commercial-loan officer Jim Byrd's death was brief and something of a disappointment. Jim did not see a light at the end of a tunnel or glimpse the pearly gates. Jim's depressing near-death experience imbues him with a curiosity about the hereafter. When a local restaurateur claims that her establishment has a mysterious presence, Jim researches the property's history and discovers that its early residents died in a fire. Jim soon rekindles a romance with his high-school sweetheart, Annie, whose first husband drowned. Together, Jim and Annie locate the scientist who has built a device that allows one to communicate with the dead. In his first novel, Pierce (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) deftly and humorously illustrates the myriad ways that technology robs us of our humanity. The concept of hologram grammers walking among us while promoting products is but one clever example. Pierce's measured, straightforward style does not overtly highlight the speculative-fiction elements, adding to their impact. Wildly imaginative and thought-provoking fun for fans of Dave Eggers and Gary Shteyngart.--Kelly, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human experience. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd on a journey to uncover the history of the home's residents and the probability of supernatural phenomena. In this quest, he dabbles in New Age religion, falls in love, loses his father, and stumbles upon the ideas of discredited physicist Sally Zinker, who claims to have built a machine that can access the afterlife. Jim, along with his wife, Annie, eventually tracks down both Sally and the mythic Reunion Machine. Not sure who or what to trust, they both must ultimately weigh the possibility of a multiverse against the risk of vanquishing their accumulated experiences and memories in this one. VERDICT Pierce has a gift for probing the limits of the psychic realm to uncover the benevolence that manifests from metaphysical insight. Truly remarkable. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

IN EVERY MOMENT WE ARE STILL ALIVE, by Tom Malmquist. (Melville House, $25.99.) Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel, translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch, depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his partner just as their daughter is born. EATING ETERNITY: Food, Art and Literature in France, by John Baxter. (Museyon, paper, $19.95.) A wide-ranging, lavishly illustrated guide to French gastronomy that broadens its subject into the fields of art and literature and the culture at large. Who ever suspected that Proust's famous madeleine almost lost out to a plain slice of toast? THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $27.) In Pierce's warm and inventive debut novel, about a heart attack victim who finds the world subtly changed, the feeling that nothing's quite real - that perhaps everything is a fever dream in the narrator's dying brain - nags at him, and at us. NINE CONTINENTS: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaoli Guo. (Grove, $26.) Guo, a writer and filmmaker, grew up in China at a time of deprivation. The Beijing Film Academy introduced her to a more cosmopolitan world; now in London, she has been acclaimed one of Britain's best young novelists. THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, byCharlesC. Mann. (Knopf, $28.95.) The essential debate of environmentalism - to respect limits, or transcend them? - as seen through the lives of two men, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. THE SABOTEUR: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, by Paul Kix. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Dashing and brave, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was a member of the French Resistance who came from an aristocratic family. Kix details his exploits and many death-defying escapes during the war. MUNICH, by Robert Harris. (Knopf, $27.95.) An expertly paced thriller featuring two junior diplomats, once friends at Oxford but now members of the opposing German and British delegations that would seal the fate of Czechoslovakia by permitting the Nazis to occupy it in 1938. RESERVOIR 13, by Jon McGregor. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) McGregor's fourth novel opens with the disappearance of a teenage girl visiting an English village, but its deeper concern is the passage of time and its effect on local residents. MARTIN RISING: Requiem for a King, by Andrea David Pinkney. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. (Scholastic, $19.99, ages 9 to 12.) A soaring, poetic account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the last month of his life. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books