The Jade Boy

Gears grind creakily and the head stirs. Two crusted eyelids flutter open. “Mother?” it says. Yang is a sentient boy made of jade and gold by an inventor at the court of Kublai Khan, and Teg Elliot discovers its disembodied head in the belongings of her just-deceased billionaire father in New York. Using his voice for the first time in 800 years, Yang says he wants badly to be reconnected with his missing limbs and torso and Teg decides to find a way to put him back together. This novel of Asian magical realism juxtaposes the China of Kublai Khan with a modern world where artificial intelligence is about to change everything. Examining what it means to be human — and what we stand to gain and lose when we are human no longer — against an exploration into the nature of time itself.