Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them—literally.

For fans of George Saunders, Claire Vaye Watkins, Michel Faber, and anyone hungry for the next page-turning book of cli-fi and speculative fiction.

In a world where eight billion souls have perished in the wake of an ecological catastrophe, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted—a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. Yet is this small hope, this compassion, enough to sustain them against the despair born of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experience they’ll never know? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?

A Kafkaesque fable of hope.