A Working Theory of Love

Silicon Valley: home of online start-ups, couture coffee, sexual meditation, and the future. In its midst, Neill Bassett is helping to build the world's first artificial intelligence - a computer that talks, thinks, lies and, if all goes to plan, feels bad about it too. But when the experiment swerves in an unexpected direction, Neill is forced to confront a few buried feelings of his own - for his ex-wife, for his dead father, for his twenty-first-century life and for a very twenty-first-century woman called Rachel, who might just hold the answer to it all . . . 'Electrifying, clever, funny and very entertaining.' The New York Times 'Worthy of Chuck Palahniuk . . . Hutchins's satirical take on 21st-century existence is sharply observed.' Independent 'Touching and extremely funny, Neill Bassett is a disenchanted bachelor for the Noughties generation. Brilliantly achieved.' GQ 'Mixes the everyman likeability of Nick Hornby with a splash of the offbeat intellect of Douglas Coupland.' Metro 'Inventive, intelligent, hilarious. One of the pleasures here is Hutchins' terrific grasp of the zeitgest.' San Francisco Chronicle