Bix Bouton, “the demigod of the digital world, known worldwide by his first name,” is restless, forty years old, father of four, and is desperately searching for a new idea. He randomly stumbles upon a discussion group, where most members are professors from Columbia University. One of them is experimenting with the externalization of memory.

The year is 2010. Within a decade, Bix’s new technological medium—Own Your Unconscious—which allows you to access all the memories of your life and gives you the ability to share them in exchange for access to the memories of others, has fascinated the masses, though not everyone.

The Candy House speaks, with boldness and admirable insight, about a world just a few moments away from our own.

It is a dazzlingly conceived book, speaking of real people, whose very different voices we hear resonating within us. And ultimately, it is a testament that affirms the endurance of the human longing for genuine connection, for love, family, privacy, and redemption.

“The Candy House is a staggering palace built full of holes. Egan wants to see social networking technology as a lived-in environment, and her true subject is memory itself, beyond the mechanisms that record it.

Her hero roams around holding a tattered copy of Ulysses, Joyce’s hundred-year-old attempt to weave a global web within a single volume. The Candy House is much more accessible, but just as ambitious in its attempt to bring an infinite network down to human measure. And I’ll say, in the common language of our collective consciousness: liked and subscribed!”

James Poniewozik, The New York Times Book Review