The Book Of The Unnamed Midwife

"In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population--killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant--the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power--and the strong who possess it. A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining"--Back cover.

“Elison offers a troubling yet hopeful vision of the future.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A strikingly powerful story of one woman’s physical and emotional resourcefulness under the most dire of circumstances. An apocalyptic page-turner that picks up where Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale left off.” —Jackie Hatton, Tor.com “I could talk about female empowerment, body positivity, and gender flexibility. But those terms are wholly inadequate for Meg Elison’s clear-eyed satire in the guise of fantasy and science fiction. Powered by rage, incandescent with a deep understanding of injustice, angry for all the right reasons, yet still essentially optimistic, these are the stories I need to keep me warm through the long dark night. Compelling and fierce and unstoppable.” —Pat Murphy, World Fantasy Award winner “Meg Elison’s stories will raise blisters on your conscience. Her politics are smart, her prose is like a razor, and her characters will break your heart. Read at your own risk.” —Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous “Meg Elison’s work is visceral and compelling. A voice that doesn’t so much demand attention as it 100 percent deserves every ounce of it.” —Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Hugo-winning writer and editor

"Elison’s brutal, incisive novel cuts to the heart of what makes public figures vulnerable and asks us to question our voyeurism." —New York Times Book Review She created a beautiful world. Now he wants it all. On her way to a speaking engagement, bestselling novelist Eli Grey gets into a cab and accepts a drink from the driver, trusting that everything is fine. She wakes up chained in the stranger’s basement. With no close family or friends expecting her to check in, Eli knows she needs to save herself. She soon realizes that her abduction wasn’t random, and though she thinks she might recognize her captor, she can’t figure out what he wants. Her only clues are that he’s very familiar with her books and deeply invested in the fantastical world she creates. What follows is a test of wills as Eli pits herself against a man who believes she owes him everything—and is determined to take it from her. Terrifying and timely, set against the backdrop of convention culture and the MeToo reckoning, Number One Fan unflinchingly examines the tension between creator and work, fandom and source material, and the rage of fans who feel they own fiction.

A teenage girl treks across a dangerous, frozen nation to reunite with her family in this Philip K. Dick Award–winning apocalyptic thriller. Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty. Her family grows marijuana illegally in order to survive. But now she’s been left behind in Ohio to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented, extreme winter. With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, Wil begins a journey to join her family in California. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. Gathering a small group of exiles on her way, she becomes the target of a volatime cult leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow. Road Out of Winter offers a glimpse into an all-too-possible near future, with a chosen family forged in the face of dystopian collapse. Alison Stine’s acclaimed debut “blends a rural thriller and speculative realism into what could be called dystopian noir” (Library Journal, starred review).

Where women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called "eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends. Now, aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to contemplate. But as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts. Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril. And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known.

A neglected girl's chaotic coming-of-age becomes a trending new hashtag in a novel about growing up and getting away by an award-winning author. Underprivileged and keenly self-aware, SoCal fourteen-year-old Layla Bailey isn't used to being noticed. Except by mean girls who tweet about her ragged appearance. All she wants to do is indulge in her love of science, protect her vulnerable younger brother, and steer clear of her unstable mother. Then a school competition calls for a biome. Layla chooses her own home, a hostile ecosystem of indoor fungi and secret shame. With a borrowed video camera, she captures it all. The mushrooms growing in her brother's dresser. The black mold blooming up the apartment walls. The unmentionable things living in the dead fridge. All the inevitable exotic toxins that are Layla's life. Then the video goes viral. When Child Protective Services comes to call, Layla loses her family and her home. Defiant, she must face her bullies and friends alike, on her own. Unafraid at last of being seen, Layla accepts the mortifying reality of visibility. Now she has to figure out how to stay whole and stand behind the truth she has shown the world.

With shades of Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, this is a gothic western transferred to the ice-locked wilds of upstate New York at the turn of the 20th century; a brutal and searing debut novel about a mother’s obsession and a son’s search for answers in the wake of a terrible and violent tragedy. In the winter of 1897, midwife Elspeth Howell returns to her isolated farmstead to find her husband and four of her five children murdered. Before she discovers her remaining son, Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, she is shot. Caleb nurses his mother back to health, cleaning her wounds and keeping her fed, before he and Elspeth leave their home to seek retribution from the men who committed this heinous crime. As they travel from country to town to hunt the murderers, the reader learns of Elspeth’s deep secret--that she kidnapped the very children who call her mother--and questions her role in the novel’s initial violence. Meanwhile Caleb is confronted with the ways of a world he’s never known. The line between justice and vengeance is thrown into question as Caleb and Elspeth are forced to reconsider their relationship and what unknown future lies ahead for both of them. The Kept is a portrait of both maternal obsessions and a primal adolescence in a brutal world. Fans of True Grit’s Mattie Ross and All the Pretty Horses’s Jimmy Blevins will love Caleb Howell, the next great old-beyond-his-years protaganist of an unforgettable literary Western--this time set in the icy wilderness of the East Coast.

The USA Today Best Seller. An enthralling new tale of courage, betrayal and survival in the hardest of circumstances that readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Secret Orphan and My Name is Eva will love.