California: A Novel
by Edan Lepucki
Buy on AmazonThe highly acclaimed, instant New York Times bestseller and NPR Book of the Year that "shows the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all of the wrong things" (San Francisco Chronicle). The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can't reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant.…
Recommended by
"I read Edan Lepucki’s suspenseful debut novel in two days, but that wasn’t without trepidation. “You’ve covered a lot of natural disasters lately,” I said to myself. “So why are you reading about a post-apocalyptic American West in your spare time?” But the book was too good to give up. Set in the near future, it follows a husband and wife who are forced to flee a crumbling LA after the “big one” hits. The only problem: Melting glaciers have flooded the Pacific Northwest, and the Rockies are devastated by wildfires. So where do they end up? You’ll have to read it to believe it. But maybe wait until the dark, winter months are through before you set out on this page turner."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org