is a novel by Douglas Coupland centred on a fictional 1988 school shooting in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath.

The novel intertwines substantial themes, including adolescent love, sex, religion, prayer and grief.

Cheryl Anway, the seventeen-year-old victim of a shooting massacre at her high school at Delbrook Senior Secondary, recounts her life from a liminal state where she is dead but can still hear the prayers and curses of those who are alive.

Cheryl was pregnant, having recently consummated her relationship with her long-term boyfriend, Jason, after they married in Las Vegas.

During one of his present-day drinking binges, Jason blacks out and comes to in an isolated location aware that he is about to be murdered by Yorgos, a friend of his boss.

Heather is left wondering about Jason's past, unaware that his decision was prompted by a chance meeting with Yorgos.

Reg writes an open letter to his son, lamenting that he was a harsh and abusive father under the guise of being a Christian for most of Jason's childhood.

Coupland began to write the novel in December 2001, after a "nightmarish 40-city tour"[2] of the United States that allowed him to experience the country's "collective sorrow".

The quotation from Corinthians that opens the novel was found on a gravestone of a child who died in a high school shooting.

One lesson I've learned is that you can never guess how a work will be received, … Curiously, The Rocky Mountain News, which is the daily that did the most intense documentation of the incident, and which is the one paper I might have been a bit tetchy about, gave the book an A-minus and told its readers that the memory of Columbine was respected, and in no way diminished or exploited.

My personal litmus test was that I didn't want any family member of a Columbine shooting to feel that their loss was being exploited.