What Birds Have Vanished
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Julia Z risks her life within the world of extreme privilege surrounding the technical elite in the new thriller from the award-winning author of All That We See or Seem.
After her last case nearly killed her, Julia Z wants what she has never had: an ordinary life. Then an anti-AI dating app matches her with Harry Calder, an art history graduate student who makes her feel understood.
But Harry is dying. A long-shot treatment depends on finding his father, who vanished before Harry was born—a brilliant mathematician whose DNA could be used to grow a replacement organ. To save Harry, Julia must return to the hacking skills she has tried to leave behind and break into a genomics company constructed like a fortress, crossing legal, ethical, and personal lines she promised herself she would never cross again.
Every breakthrough in the search for the vanished man draws Julia deeper into a hidden world of private clinics, clandestine medical experiments, and fortunes vast enough to make the law irrelevant, forcing her to ask how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice for the man she loves.
Ken Liu combines a deeply human story of love and trust with a high-stakes tale of genomic surveillance, private medicine, and extreme wealth in a novel about what happens when death becomes a problem only the rich can afford to solve.
Ken Liu
Ken Liu is an award-winning American author of speculative fiction. His collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. Liu’s other works include The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, The Veiled Throne, a second collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the forthcoming Julia Z series. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work, including the short story “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories. “The Hidden Girl,” “The Message,” and “The Oracle” have also been optioned for development. Liu previously worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, and the value of storytelling. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
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