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
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.
As the world dies, the remnants of the patriarchy and their minions keep right on terrorizing the weak.
Caustically original in the same fashion as her chilling Tender Is the Flesh (2020), Bazterrica’s latest devises an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe. The most palpable tragedy is that no matter how the world dies, women always seem to end up with the same sorry fortune. The story is set in an unknown wasteland where all the animals on Earth have perished, with callouts to a mysterious, poisonous haze and a collapsed world. Our narrator is a young woman relegated to sheltering in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, an isolated, fundamentalist order subservient to an unseen, deity-like “He,” and divided into strict castes. Among these are the Enlightened, kept isolated from the rest of the order behind a mysterious black door; the Chosen, divine and devoted prophets who are ritually mutilated; and the servants marked by contamination, who sit just below the narrator’s caste, the unworthy young women. The story is a little tough to follow due to the narrator’s fragmented memory, not to mention lots of interruptions from the old ultraviolence and body horror. Although men are banned from the cloistered stronghold, it’s a relentlessly sadistic and violent society ruled by the Superior Sister, enforcer of His will and the instrument of punishment up to and including torture and death. The narrator is already mourning Helena, a spirited iconoclast who couldn’t survive under such oppression, when a new arrival named Lucía sparks fresh hope that may prove as fruitless as everything else in this bleak testament to suffering. As a subversion of expectations and an indictment of unchecked power, it’s unflinching and provocative, but readers expecting a satisfying denouement may be left wanting.
A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051887
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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