What Birds Have Vanished

Julia Z risks her life within the world of extreme privilege surrounding the technical elite in the new thriller from the award-winning author of All That We See or Seem.

After her last case nearly killed her, Julia Z wants what she has never had: an ordinary life. Then an anti-AI dating app matches her with Harry Calder, an art history graduate student who makes her feel understood.

But Harry is dying. A long-shot treatment depends on finding his father, who vanished before Harry was born—a brilliant mathematician whose DNA could be used to grow a replacement organ. To save Harry, Julia must return to the hacking skills she has tried to leave behind and break into a genomics company constructed like a fortress, crossing legal, ethical, and personal lines she promised herself she would never cross again.

Every breakthrough in the search for the vanished man draws Julia deeper into a hidden world of private clinics, clandestine medical experiments, and fortunes vast enough to make the law irrelevant, forcing her to ask how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice for the man she loves.

Ken Liu combines a deeply human story of love and trust with a high-stakes tale of genomic surveillance, private medicine, and extreme wealth in a novel about what happens when death becomes a problem only the rich can afford to solve.