Set from December 1999 to Mardi Gras 2000, Messiah introduces two remarkable young women: Felicity, a girl detective in New Orleans, and Andrea, a Sarajevan orphan who has found asylum in Jerusalem after internment in a Serbian POW camp. Felicity and Andrea, both presciently self-aware, come to believe they are the two severed halves of a whole entity, eventually finding each other amid the chaos of millennial fervor. Their special mission: to fulfill an extraordinary destiny as Armageddon sweeps the earth

An erudite zydeco hora danced on the head of the millennial pin, Messiah is wild to be fun, crazy enough to be perfectly true

– TOM ROBBINS author, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

As always. Codrescu, a child of the night, makes beautiful music as he mocks, deconstructs, and otherwise poetically preys upon our precarious society. Messiah is a flaming arrow from the next Testament, a wake-up call aimed directly at the heart of the Wilderness: Jesus couldn't have said it better

— BARRY GIFFORD author, Wild at Heart

How good is Andrei Codrescu’s new book? He imagines a future so like our present in its narcissism, its media obsession, its millennial craziness, that it does not make me scream. Oh Christ, no, not another future! He uses our language so elegantly. with such wit and verve, that he makes me think the secret to writing great English is to be born speaking Rumanian If you can have but one book with you on New Year's Eve 1999, this is the one

— HARRY SHEARER, actor and comedian

Andrei Codrescu’s Messiah visits the famous turf of Isaac Singer, where the super-real commingles with the supernatural with brilliant weavings of fin-de-siècle characters and conversations within millennium-maddened sects. Ancient desires for eternity commingle with the high tech modem/modern. ... What does salvation mean in an era of digital mania? Codrescu has his lobes glowing full furnace looking for the answers

— ED SANDERS, poet and author The Family

Andrei Codrescu has an imagination that seems to be limitless. He puts it to terrific use in his new novel, Messiah, a sprawling fable for the end of the millen-nium. When past and present mingle in cyberspace, anything can happen

— ANDREI SERBAN, theater director