Novel: After the Fall

Forthcoming from Fitzroy Books, December 3, 2024

"The blankets were cool against my scars. I couldn't hear the voices downstairs through the rain on the roof, but I could feel them rumbling. Bob and Denise had called the man Jacob. That name didn't mean a thing to me, but I couldn't get it out of my head. The barn was on fire all over again, and I could still hear the screaming and smell my skin burning. And I could see his face, slick with sweat, teeth bared, half lit by flame. He'd been there. And now he was in the room below me. I fumbled with the candle and lifted Motorsports Monthly from the floor and tried to read, but the words swam under my fingers. I tried harder. I couldn't concentrate. The candle flame flickered in the wind through the cracks and the words on the page turned into Jacob's face, and then my mom's face, and then the memory came loose and broke over me, clearer than ever before..."

It's been a hundred years since a half-forgotten global decline known only as "the Fall." June, a 15-year old living in the Republic of Vermont, can't remember the color of her mom's hair, or where they lived, or why her mom kept illegal American money sewn into the lining of her coat. But she knows her mom is still out there, and she knows she doesn't belong in the backwater hollow where everyone calls her an orphan. So when an American circus passes through, she follows them with Thomas, the orphan she considers a brother.

In the wider world, June finds more questions than answers: why does everyone in the Republic hate Americans? Why do her re-emerging memories of her mom--and the accident that separated them--seem to contradict each other? Who is Jacob, a man whose face she recognizes, but who claims he doesn't have anything to do with her past?

Soon, a series of mysterious deaths and the disappearance of Thomas force June and Jacob to venture out into the world blighted by the Fall. And as June gets closer to discovering the truth about her mother, she finds that her own past is inexorably connected to the unforeseen invasion unfolding around her.