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The end of the world is nigh—or is it?

Cellphones all over the small Western Massachusetts town of Beckitt light up with the terrifying announcement of an incoming ballistic missile, propelling some of the town’s citizens into radical action and leaving others frozen helplessly in place. After it turns out to have been a false alarm, the fallout of those first brief moments may, in some ways, prove almost as devastating as the disaster itself would have been. Yu’s debut novel follows many characters through the time before and after that life-changing moment. Some of the characters are closely related; others come together briefly by chance, but each, in their own way, is indelibly affected by that fateful day. Among them: a mother, struggling with a secret, impetuously texts her daughter something that might cause irreparable damage. A music-school dropout and budding bluegrass musician is starting to feel he has nothing to live for when a chance encounter with a kindly server at the Anchor Grill might turn his fortune around. Across town, a normally responsible husband and father acts out of instinct, convincing his wife she’s seen his true colors and may never be able to forgive him. In the midst of the rippling effects of that choice, the man—who has spent his entire career at the PR firm his father founded—desperately grasps for a narrative that will hold his once-picture-perfect life together. For some of the characters, it’s a dramatic action that changes everything; for others, it’s the failure to act. The novel twists and turns into the private and public lives of the characters, offering a quirky, often funny, and sharply rendered peek into small-town life and the moments, large and small, that ripple out beyond our horizon of perception.

A quietly profound debut that asks what we would really do if we believed we would die within the next few seconds.