A contemplative and quietly brilliant tale of one world ending and another beginning.
After an attack on America destroys the world as she knows it, a woman struggles to survive alone in the forests of West Virginia in Bowling’s dystopian novel.
Aurora Scott knew just where to go when a coordinated cyber-strike brought the United States to its knees. As the widow of a former National Security Agency employee, she’s long been familiar with dangers that lurk in the shadows. Years ago, her husband suggested they buy property “off-grid” and build a self-sufficient home deep in the West Virginia woods; she doubted its necessity at the time, but for six months now, she’s lived there alone, finding a sort of peace in this new isolated life, despite an occasional “lost day…when I let myself get caught up in a bout of malaise and melancholy.” As a former teacher at a wilderness school, she’s in a familiar world, even a beautiful one. Her days are ordered, and she tracks them in her journal; she traps animals, maps the surrounding area, preserves food for colder months, and always watches for signs of intruders. But when she’s driven from her home by threatening strangers and finds a seriously injured young woman in the forest, she finds herself unprepared for the choices she now must make. Overall, this is a stirring and often moving account of one woman surviving the unimaginable and building a new life in the rubble. Bowling’s spare, evocative prose vividly captures the cold beauty of the West Virginia woods, and there’s a bald honesty to Aurora’s story, told through journal entries, that resonates deeply. There are no zombies or killer plagues, but the book has something more compelling: the story of a woman who’s trying to get on with the business of living, and of her gradually shifting perceptions of life as it now is. Indeed, watching someone rediscovering the value of community in a changing world is nothing short of riveting.
A contemplative and quietly brilliant tale of one world ending and another beginning.Pub Date: May 26, 2023
ISBN: 9798886930429
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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