The stability of the Survivor’s Alliance is still fragile. They made it through the winter, but now it’s flu season. Every year the virus changes just a little. Tillie and Angus are trying to prepare for every scenario, even the possibility that they will be the first to go. Nick is working to bridge the gap in supplies until the spring crops come in. Wisp and Bridget are preparing for the birth of their child. But there are changes coming that no one expected.

While a wildfire threatens High Meadow, an uninvited guest sows seeds of dissent. The president arrives at High Meadow with his entourage of bureaucrats and faux-military. Tillie and Angus don’t have time for any distractions as a massive wildfire bears down on their settlement. It will take more than hard work and good intentions to get them through this catastrophe. Martin is leery about sending all of his men to aid those in the path of the fire thereby leaving their borders unprotected. They are most vulnerable in their commitment to help others. Wisp and Nick work the fire lines seeking out people fleeing the raging flames. Only Wisp can find those lost in the heavy smoke, risking his life to bring them to safety. Behind their backs, certain people are questioning every decision. At a time when they most need to work together, the outsiders are creating divisiveness.

As starving, travel weary people overrun High Meadow, Tillie and Angus must do a delicate dance to keep the doors open. Angus has set the boundaries for their new territory and Martin is tasked with keeping it safe. Tillie struggles to get everyone fed while keeping an eye on the stores for winter. Wisp helps where he can, vetting the newcomers and finding stragglers, but not every person comes under his scrutiny. He has to learn new skills to deal with the increasing mental pressure of the desperate arrivals. The refugees seem to be only concerned with food and shelter, but a handful of them might be working toward malicious aims. After a dangerous confrontation, Nick warns Angus that the biobots at High Meadow need more security. Within the flood of people, not all are who they seem to be. The gentle people of High Meadow need to prepare for war or lose what they cherish most.

While High Meadow is dealing with troublemakers and raiders, Wisp follows an invisible trail across the country to rescue Nick. What had started as a simple trip turns into an undercover operation for Nick, leaving Wisp to return to High Meadow on his own with a van full of children. In the search for answers, Nick learns that the problems are more complex than he imagined. The country’s minimal infrastructure is teetering on the brink of collapse. And the people in charge are not at all what he’d hoped. Angus predicts that the high mortality rate from the last round of flu could cause the disintegration of smaller settlements putting people on the road. With the train stations closed, there will be no food or shelter for these refugees, leaving them victim to marauders and starvation. As Tillie scrambles to plan for a winter without train food, the influx of refugees is eating up precious supplies. The world is changing again and they must adapt or die.

In the near future, a virus has whittled down the human race. The remaining population struggles to survive in a world ravaged by extreme weather. A reticent government provides food, vaccines and keeps the ultra-fast trains running. Cities are empty, farms deserted, factories abandoned. The world is running on a skeleton crew. Nick lives at High Meadow med center. The people there stay hopeful as they work toward self-sufficiency. He counts survivors for Angus’s research. He wants his life to stay as normal as possible in a world he barely understands. Wisp is a fugitive biobot. He lives off the land, moving from town to town, hiding his extrasensory skills. He is a Finder and will accept the right kind of job. Silence and subterfuge keep him alive. Lily is a young girl with long brown hair and eyes the color of ripe cherries. She is searching for her brother. They were separated while fleeing armed men. She is part of something that started before her birth.

In the wake of a series of global catastrophes that have destroyed industrial civilization, the inhabitants of Union Grove, a small New York town, do anything they can to get by, as they struggle to deal with a new way of life over the course of an eventful summer, in a novel set several decades in the future. By the author of The Long Emergency. Reprint.

'Crushing...intensely vital' Observer 'It's impossible to tear yourself away' The Times 'Such brilliant writing about female desire...honest and visceral' Marian Keyes She's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming. But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She's intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other's ideals. He keeps emailing his thin, glamorous ex, and she's starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn... We're all looking to get what we want - but do we know what we need?

Attacked by pirates aboard a cargo ship, the scientists realize they’re in a brutal race against time to find a cure for the growing plague. As things heat up in the United States with both the U.S. military and radical militias targeting those trying to develop a vaccine and cure for the Zombie Plague, more researchers flee to Mark Chen’s bunker in China. There, they will be free to carry on their research. Bringing patients afflicted with the Zombie Virus to China on a cargo ship, they’re attacked by pirates. It becomes very clear that they’re in a race against time to try and save the human race. NOVELLA. GENRES: Zombie Fiction, Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Conspiracy Fiction, Horror. Mutation Z: Desperate Measures is the sixth and final book in the Mutation Z series. “I almost didn’t want to start this one as it’s the final book and I didn’t want it to end. / I wondered who would survive, if they’d find a cure, whether the world could be saved. I didn’t have a clue how all of my questions would be answered. / The author did a bang up job of doing just that.” – Laura, FUONLYKNEW Blog “Marilyn Peake wraps up this novella series, exposing all the conspiracies and corruption, the perverted reasons for setting the zombies loose, and my juices were flowing as they pissed me off and sickened me beyond words, but left me with the faith that a…few good men/women can make all the difference in the world.” – Sherry Fundin, Blogger and Reviewer

Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW! NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Elle • Refinery29 • PopSugar • Verge Author of LA Times Prize finalist The Cartographers “The Book of M is devastating and inventive as Shepherd examines the value of memory, packing in imaginative twists as she goes.” —USA Today "Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage and Station Eleven." —Booklist WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER? Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself. One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too. Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless. As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure. Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down. Don't miss the latest captivating novel by Peng Shepherd: The Cartographers

Margaret Atwood and Social Justice eventually presents a loose ideology evident in the author’s major works of prose fiction. It insists, however, that Atwood is a writer, not an ideologue, and that, therefore, this ideology evolves over her career, always secondary to her presenting stories and characters and, through them, ideas. Throughout her career, Atwood has been concerned about the social injustice experienced by women. After expressing concern for the plight of the environment in Surfacing and workers in Life Before Man, Atwood turned quite political in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, blending her concern for justice for women with criticism of present-day Third-World and future right-wing governments. Atwood, then, turned inward, looking at how those denied justice often do the same to others and turned to history, looking at injustice tied to social class. She later brought many of her concerns together in The Blind Assassin and, especially, the three books that comprise the MaddAddam trilogy. Later works such as The Heart Goes Last, Hag-Seed, and The Testaments add to the picture most fully articulated in The Blind Assassin, which looks back at the 1930s, and the MaddAddam books, which look ahead to a future marked by global warming, corporate oppression, and pandemic. As argued here, these later books strengthen her indictment of corporations, which oppress for the sake of profit, and offer her most straightforward recognition that race plays a major role in whether social justice is served or not.