The First Sustainable Country on Earth

August Vane made his fortune in the narrow tolled space between people and the things they cannot live without, and a diagnosis gives him nine to fourteen months and no heirs. Free of every lever the machine uses to own a man, he resolves to give away ten figures before the lawyers and the foundation can lock it into a respectable perpetuity, and to aim it at the apparatus he knows from the inside. Henry Goodstone's novel moves from a windowless Washington room, where a suppressed study on displaced workers meets a certification deadline, to a national reckoning about who the country's wealth is actually for. It is a story about the one man in America who cannot be bought, and what he does with the little time he has.