Lauren Beukes

In infinite parallel universes, there's a version of you who already has everything you've ever wanted. But 24 year old drop-out Bridge is paralysed, by all the other lives she could have lived, the choices she could have made, and now, whoever she's supposed to be in the wake of her mother's premature death. They've always had a complicated relationship. Jo was the teenage runaway turned maverick neuroscientist who threw everything away chasing after an impossibility - a mysterious artefact - the dreamworm - that allows you to switch between realities. And now she's dead and any chance of reconciliation with her.

But is Jo really gone... or only in this universe? When Bridge and her best friend Dom stumble on the dreamworm, that does indeed open the doors to other worlds, otherselves, she becomes convinced her mom is lost out there. But the dreamworm is more dangerous than she can imagine, and she's not the only one hunting across time and space.

Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.

Four hurt and damaged individuals trying to make lives for themselves in a broken, uncertain future. But as events send them on a collision course their worlds are about to change in unexpected - and explosive - ways.

Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheque, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job - missing persons.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions reside. Instead it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives - including her own.