It's the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity- and as midnight approaches- a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid- conflicting emotions. The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future- as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love- larceny- and a new sexual order- he must avoid capture and imprisonment- starvation- pandemic- and some particularly bad weather. In Things We Didn't See Coming- Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.