From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a futuristic thriller about science, love, politics, and social disarray.Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings. For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The search for Della´s son and Alex´s missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life. A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper´s Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.