Jennifer Egan's novel moves through time and perspective like a shuffle function through a playlist, following characters across decades as they navigate the music industry, memory, and the way time changes everything it touches. The book centers on Bennie Salazar, a punk rocker turned record executive haunted by his declining relevance, and Sasha, his assistant whose compulsive kleptomania reflects deeper hungers for connection. But these are merely anchors in a narrative that expands outward to encompass Sasha's uncle in Naples, Bennie's mentor Lou who preyed on young women, and characters who appear as children in one chapter and adults in another. Egan experiments with form: one chapter consists entirely of a PowerPoint presentation created by a teenage girl; another follows a publicist during the Good War in an unspecified future. The structure embodies the book's themes of discontinuity and persistence--how we become unrecognizable to our earlier selves while remaining somehow the same. Music provides the throughline, from San Francisco punk clubs to corporate recording studios to a concert in a transformed Manhattan. Egan, who grew up in the same San Francisco punk scene her characters inhabit, writes with insider knowledge of how artistic idealism curdles into commercial compromise. The novel's scattered timeline ultimately coheres into a meditation on what survives the passage of time and what disappears forever.