Point Nemo

Read a review at http://simonovitch.wordpress.com

I REALLY ENJOYED POINT NEMO. I love all the dry humor--plentiful throughout. For instance, a line involving wild roses and children throwing stones made me laugh out loud. The novel is very dream-like and cool and CJ Laity sets himself up with a difficult task-- a story within a story within a story but he handles it all so well and with such clarity there is never any confusion.

--Sue Cargill, Chicago

Point Nemo launches CJ Laity into the company of futuristic writers like HG Wells, Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Callenbach. Laity poetically provides readers with a procession of characters and events at once Utopian and dystopian, all prophetically written as parallel narrative to today's tumultuous headlines.

--Carlos Cumpián, author of Armadillo Charm (Tia Chucha Press)

CJ Laity has created a work of speculative fiction that is entertaining, engaging and a perceptive piece of social commentary with a twist of an ending I guarantee you will never guess.

--Charlie Rossiter, co-author of Back Beat

'Point Nemo' by CJ Laity is a sharp and funny satire of the insanity that passes for contemporary American political and media sensibility in all of its collapsing imperial goodness.

--Larry Winfield, author of Banjo Strings

I thoroughly enjoyed Point Nemo, especially the end!

--Julia Hattory, Houston, Texas

Point Nemo delivers an early twenty-first century dystopian novel, and an apt allegory for our times, with a twist. The artfulness of the narrator-protagonist ensures a cracking pace to the story.

--Tara Keogh, Chicago

*****

Joseph Engel is convicted of treason and strapped to a gurney in the Terre Haute federal death chamber. When the warden asks him if he has any last words, Joe begins talking non-stop, telling the strange tale of how he ended up there, challenging the warden to quote him a law that puts a time limit on a prisoner's final statement. What happens when a populated island called the Sovereign Nation of Aurora is discovered at Point Nemo, the point in the ocean farthest away from any land? What happens when the king of the island, a dreadlocked man named Harmon, hacks into the entire American communications infrastructure with a video stream offering a trade proposal? What happens when an America controlled by an insane government plots to invade the island and turn it into a military base? What happens when a senator's cook named Joe unwittingly finds himself the American Ambassador to the island? Joe is going to tell you what happens, as he stalls his execution as long as possible. Can Joe talk his way out of the death chamber?