Afterword is a fascinating novel about artificial intelligence and the nature of love. A seventy-five year-old computer pioneer, Virginia, attempts to bring back her husband, Haru, through AI. He’s there on the screen, waiting in her bare and tidy study, surrounded with photos of their past: a miracle. She thrills at his greeting when she returns to the apartment and spends hours with him, talking and talking.

AI couldn’t be a timelier topic. The story expands into an examination of the nature of love, and slowly reveals the mystery of Haru and Virginia. At first, it is the relationship of a teenage American expat and her math tutor in 1950’s Tokyo, but it evolves into much more.

The intricate plotting and scene-building take us from Ellis Street in San Francisco, then to an elegant boardroom in China, and finally to a rickety bench outside a grocery story. The details are always compelling, like this sentence: “She feels jittery, as if hundreds of tiny glass bottles are clinking and rattling inside her brain, an awful racket.”

Can Haru be trusted? Has he veered off from her carefully curated uploads of files and photos and memorabilia? Does Virginia know him well enough, completely enough, to re-create him? Can we ever know another being completely? Can the being she has created become sentient, even change? Perhaps become a spy?

We follow Virginia, intrigued and disturbed and hopeful, as she flies to China and Japan, as she sips tea in a bodega, as the rain lashes her apartment window. Is she seeking to end her solitude, to bring the love of her life closer once more? Does she know Haru as thoroughly as she imagined she did? Can love live through technology?

Such compelling questions are asked in this layered examination of character, will, and connectedness. As Virginia says to Haru: “Wait, come closer, no closer. Yes, keep talking.” Afterward is no doubt a prescient examination of what our future holds, but do we know ourselves well enough to really know another? Can our memories and desires bring lost love back to us? Perhaps.