A young woman battles a massive corporation to rescue her mother from sinister medical experiments in Ember’s SF thriller.

This novel depicts a near-future San Francisco, renamed Gold City, controlled by the totalitarian Y Corporation, which provides residents a vaccine that protects against a deadly virus, but also turns the vaccinated into near-zombies. The company also implants smart “PPC” devices in people’s hands that track their movements and ply them with pharmaceutical ads from the Cartel: “Try Upreelexia™. The most fun feeling when you are down.” The narrative follows Roxy de Brannon, a 20-year-old who’s denied housing because she refuses to take Cartel drugs; she scrapes by on stale sandwiches from the Y Corp “feeding center” and hits of Kybin, an illegal drug that protects against both the virus and the vaccine while inducing a mellow, mystical high. Roxy discovers that her estranged mother, Margaret, has volunteered for a medical experiment in which she receives extra vaccine doses; the drug transforms the once-vibrant 40-something into someone resembling a 90-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. Roxy springs Margaret from the psych ward, assisted by Leo, a handsome super-hacker and son of a Y Corp executive, and Ahtum, Leo’s altogether too pretty friend. Dodging Y Corp tanks and drones, the foursome head east toward a Tennessee-based rebel enclave in an autonomous car that Leo has endowed with an invisibility cloak—only to find Y Corp’s tentacles there as well. Ember conjures a grungy, paranoid, scarily plausible future of mass unemployment and helpless destitution under the thumb of Big Tech, omnipresent artificial intelligence, and manipulative social media feeds. Roxy’s narration renders this existence in the clipped, telegraphic voice of text messages—shorn of articles, prepositions, and pronouns—but still viscerally evocative of the wounding incursions of technology: “Bang PPC against railing of highway… there’s searing pain in palm where solid metal bolts surgically placed between bones during installation. Turn hand over and inspect. Skin is torn again, red and raw with glistening pus and crusting, dirty scabs.” The result is a gripping but thoughtful dystopian adventure story that will keep readers entertained.

An imaginative and ominous vision of things soon to come.

In Ember’s debut novel, a real estate agent struggles to prevent her past from sabotaging her present.

Ruby lives under a cloud of anxiety and depression. A successful real estate agent in the Bay Area, she refuses to give in to self-pity, even when an irate stranger spits on her in the middle of traffic: “I have no right to complain about the pain inside my head, my body, my soul,” she claims. “So many people in this world have real suffering that is much worse than mine.” Ruby is haunted by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and by a psychotic break she experienced decades ago. She struggles in her romantic life, as she has a tendency to prioritize the needs of the men she dates over her own. As she shepherds annoying and ungrateful clients through potential home purchases—often trying to ignore the addicted and mentally ill people who live on the streets right outside—Ruby fights to get a better hold on her personal and professional relationships. Ultimately, though, the relationship she most needs to figure out is the one she has with herself. The author’s prose captures Ruby’s sharp, obsessive inner monologue, as when she fantasizes about the new man in her life, a Burning Man fan in his 50s named Nate: “It was Sunday and I was scheduled to hold the open house for Ugly-Jacket Lady. I wished I could have stayed with Nate, maybe climbed onto the back of his scooter…I was still high from our encounter, and I couldn’t focus on anything, not that selling real estate requires more thought or consciousness than it takes to drool.” Ember highlights Ruby’s trauma a bit too emphatically—a more subtle introduction of the subject would likely have been more effective—but she effectively dramatizes Ruby’s pathology in a way that demonstrates the intractability of her pain. A short novel at less than 150 pages, this narrative offers a startling and often moving slice of contemporary life.

A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.