Fiction, 234 pages. September 15, 2020.

Cover art by Brigitte Lewis

Luci Sykes, maliciously deprived of oxygen at birth, is subjected to a lobotomy at thirteen by her powerful father. She emerges from her childhood silence to become the supernova genius behind Olympia Navigation, producer of the world’s mostintuitive GPS systems.

 When her hermetic mother, Maggie, dies, events are set in motion to embroil Luci’s twin brother, Tokker, separated from at birth and long hidden on a subsistence farm in the Midwest, and BEACON, Olympia’s penultimate GPS system, in a plan to foil Luci’s suspected plot to end the human race. Tokker and BEACON embark on a cross-country scavenger hunt spanning Oregon to New York, abetted by the likes of Tilda Swinton and Daniel Day Lewis in this darkly funny, unlikelybuddy story of humans and machines and the earth.

Praise for Committal:

Irene Cooper writes with a poet's ear for language and an empath's insights into our deepest human needs. Her character, Luci Sykes, abandoned by her mother, lobotomized by her father, is a 21st century Frankenstein, brilliant and determined to end the world. Committal, set in the near future, is by turns surreal and wrenching.

 ~Beth Alvarado, Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales