Things We Didn't See Coming »

Steven Amsterdam is a native New Yorker who moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2003. He currently works as a palliative care nurse.

Richly imagined and darkly comic, Things We Didn’t See Coming follows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but treacherous weather, unstable governments, pandemic, and technology run amuck.

The Washington Post - W. Ralph Eubanks

As the unnamed narrator develops from cheeky preteen to adolescent thief to adult survivor and government bureaucrat, the reader marvels at his adaptability, growth and transformation…I never grew tired of these pieces and read each one straight through, eagerly anticipating the next. They are fresh and original. Amsterdam is an innovative storyteller with a great gift for dialogue and staging. Things We Didn't See Coming is the kind of book that can inspire us to think differently about the world and entertain us at the same time. In its occasional darkness, we can also see light.