Loop

Stunning, cutting-edge thriller with a chilling twist from Japan's stylish new literary star, the acclaimed author of 'Ring' and 'Spiral'. Kaoru's father, Hideyuki, is dying. A new, viral, form of cancer is ravaging his body. This nightmarish, incurable disease has appeared apparently from nowhere, and has begun to affect organisms all over the planet. When he was a child, Kaoru and his father would sit up late into the night discussing complex scientific issues. Now a medical student, despite his precocious intelligence Karou seems powerless in the face of the rapacious disease which has probably also infected his mother, and possibly himself. But clues begin to present themselves. Twenty years ago Hideyuki worked on a virtual reality project which replicated evolution on earth called the Loop. The project failed when the organisms within it inexplicably stopped reproducing normally and started cloning. Nearly all of the other scientists who worked on the Loop are already dead -- from cancer. To get to the heart of the mystery, Kaoru must travel to the other side of the planet, to the Mojave desert.
The secret he encounters there overturns everything he thought he knew about the world -- and his own identity. Suzuki masterfully confounds the reader in this suspense-filled follow-up to 'Ring' and 'Spiral' , taking the story in an utterly unexpected direction.