Golden State, Ben H. Winters
Golden State, Ben H. Winters
1 Rating(s)
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Golden State

Author: Ben H. Winters

Narrator: Kiff VandenHeuvel

Unabridged: 10 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/22/2019

Synopsis

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling novelist Ben H. Winters comes a mind-bending novel set in a world governed by absolute truth, where lies are as dangerous as murder.
In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible.
In the Golden State, knowingly contradicting the truth is the greatest crime -- and stopping those crimes is Laz's job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths, to "speculate" on what might have happened.
But the Golden State is less of a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the truth requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance and recording. And when those in control of the facts twist them for nefarious means, the Speculators are the only ones with the power to fight back.

About Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters is an Edgar Award nominee and a New York Times best-selling author. His most recent novel, Bedbugs, was hailed by Vanity Fair as a “diabolical tale of paranoia.” He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily on February 20, 2019

This book gave me 1984 and The Giver vibes with its dystopian world. A world where truth is important and lying can get you exiled. An interesting premise but a shorter format would have worked better for me.......more

Goodreads review by Lark on February 18, 2019

Let it be known that I loved this novel. It kept making me happier and happier. Instead of the cranky nihilism I've come to expect from dystopian novels, this novel instead evolves into a lovely fatalism. I loved that love wins, if in an extreme sort of way. But what a pretzel of a book! At first it......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on March 01, 2024

It’s not clear when it happened or what happened, but it was BIG. Now nobody talks about it, in fact everything before has been erased: there are no documents, there is no known history. This new world, in the same place as the old world, has rules that preclude lots of things and knowledge of the p......more

Goodreads review by Blake on December 14, 2018

Golden State is a prescient, devastating commentary on humanity's disintegrating attachment to reality and truth, expertly told through the prism of a police-procedural, dystopian nightmare. Winters has written a 1984 for the 21st century. Not just a thrilling book, but an important one.......more

Goodreads review by Matt on February 05, 2019

Sometimes a book sits with you to the point that you can’t stop thinking about it. Golden State won’t be for everyone, but it’s one of those books that leave the reader thinking. I like books that question reality and what reality means. In today’s world that’s more important than ever. With news be......more

Quotes

"At a time in the real world when everybody seems to own their version of the truth and phrases like "alternative facts" are used to cover falsehoods, Golden State is, no lie, a fascinating examination that takes fidelity and correctness down a freaky Orwellian path."—USA Today

"Winters has a knack for creating appealing detective fictions that skew reality in thought-provoking ways, producing a hybrid of the familiar and the uncanny. . . . As you read, you feel your perception of the world slipping and warping. Winters brilliantly imagines the quotidian manifestations of a truth-obsessed culture."—Washington Post

"Once again, Ben H. Winters creates a world cleverly skewed a few crucial degrees from our own. . . . Winters is well aware of the tropes of dystopian noir, and it is fun to watch him mix and match them to good effect. . . . The detective plot works well, but it is in its questioning of the nature of truth and falsehood that the novel excels. . . . Smart, intricate and propulsive, Golden State is proof that Winters deserves our continued attention as one of crime fiction's most inventive practitioners."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Winters has won major awards in both the mystery and speculative-fiction genres. The brain-teasing Golden State exists in a space where those two forms coexist. As a consequence, a sympathetic reader's imaginings may persist long after the book's puzzles have been solved."—Wall Street Journal

"Nothing speaks to the power of a weapon like it inspiring a work of speculative fiction, and Ben H. Winter's Golden State is the dystopian take on the new tool of war du jour: lies."—Paste Magazine, 'One of the Best Books of January'

"In Golden State, Winters has fashioned a wry commentary on our current era of fake news."—The Guardian [UK]

"An entertaining new take on the venerable genre-blending of noir and science fiction."—The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Like any good dystopian yarn,Golden State shows . . . how any organization or government can warp good intentions into truly harmful ones."—The Verge

"An entertaining, unpredictable read."—Financial Times

"A perfectly poised ontological-thriller-comedy-dystopian-allegorical-page-turner, yet with tenderly real characters in its chewy center, this turned out to be just the thing I was looking for."—Jonathan Lethem

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