Aurora
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3.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
‘Fantastic story, a real page-turner. Impossible to put down’ Stephen King
‘Forget a good night’s sleep. Aurora is epic’ Linwood Barclay
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When the lights go out no one is safe…
A planet without power.
When a solar storm hits the earth, the lights go out across the planet. But this time the blackout won’t be over soon – it could last for years. Aubrey and her stepson now face the biggest challenge of their lives.
A society without rules.
Soon they hear rumours of riots, the struggle for food becomes real, and even within their small communities, the rule of law is collapsing. Aubrey’s estranged brother Thom, a self-made billionaire who abandoned her years ago, retreats to a gilded desert bunker where he can ride out the crisis in perfect luxury.
A race to build a better world…
But the complicated history between the siblings is far from over, and what feels like the end of the world is just the beginning of a personal reckoning long overdue…
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'Forget a good night’s sleep. Aurora is epic, but personal and poignant, horrifying and darkly funny, and flat-out suspenseful’ Linwood Barclay
‘With Aurora, David Koepp has firmly staked his ground as one of the best thriller writers working today’ Blake Crouch
‘Aurora contains two great narratives on a collision course. When, where and how they collide will you keep you turning pages right up to The End’ Brian De Palma
‘David Koepp does it again! Mixing humour, terror, and an all-too-believable doomsday scenario, Aurora is at the top of my list this year’ Christina Dalcher
‘There’s a reason David Koepp is the most successful screenwriter of all time. It’s because he’s one of the greatest storytellers of all time. Aurora is up there with his best: scary, funny, and thought provoking. Buy it immediately’ Scott Frank, writer and director of The Queen’s Gambit
‘Everything a great novel, and great thriller, should be … Frightening, surprising, wildly entertaining, but also full of heart’ Mike Lupica, co-author of The Horsewoman with James Patterson, and Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour
‘Terrifyingly plausible, this apocalyptic tale focusses on one family and their trials and triumphs in the face of horrifying odds. Moving, thrilling, and thoughtful, it's a high-velocity thriller with heart and soul.’ Tim Lebbon, author of The Last Storm
‘This techno-thriller is a real page-turner: diving into the devastating consequences of an all-too-plausible “end of life as we know it” event… Koepp keeps the reader in constant suspense while making the fall-out of these epic events both relatable and poignant… you won't be able to put it down!’ Ally Wilkes, author of All the White Spaces
About the author
David Koepp is a celebrated American screenwriter who’s written more than two dozen feature films in a wide variety of genres, including the first two Jurassic Park films, Death Becomes Her, Carlito’s Way, The Paper, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room, War of the Worlds, Angels and Demons, and Inferno. Some of the films he’s both written and directed are Stir of Echoes, Secret Window, Ghost Town, and Premium Rush, the latter two co-written with John Kamps. Koepp is also the author of the novel Cold Storage. He lives in Santa Barbara.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this chilling scientific thriller from Koepp (Cold Storage), astronomers learn that "a giant cloud of solar plasma drenched with magnetic field lines" will strike Earth in less than a day and cause a devastating global blackout. Since the U.S. government doesn't control power plants, it's up to the states to shut down transformers to significantly mitigate the impact of the solar strike. Inevitably, the governors resist such a move, and the country is plunged into cascading chaos. With cell towers and electrical lines down, the president can't even communicate with anyone not within shouting distance. The ordinary people who must deal with the extraordinary circumstances include Aubrey Wheeler, of Aurora, Ill., whose brutish ex-husband abandoned a teenage son from a previous relationship for her to parent; 88-year-old retired college professor Norman Levy, a neighbor of Wheeler's; and Patrick Brady, the loyal assistant to a billionaire with some eccentric ideas for surviving the blackout. Koepp's imaginative plotting will keep readers turning the pages to learn the fates of characters they readily become invested in. Michael Crichton fans will hope for more from Koepp.
Customer Reviews
I preferred the killer fungus
The author is an American screenwriter and director. (Jurassic Park 1 and 2, Spider-Man, Panic Room, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible etc.) His movies have grossed over $6 billion worldwide, so he decided to write a novel, Cold Storage (2019), about an alien killer fungus. That went well, so he thought he’d write another, which was snapped up by Netflix pre-publication. Kathryn Bigelow directing, no less.
Electromagnetic storms come out of the sun. Sometimes they hit Earth. Glancing blows mostly. There was a biggie in the mid-1800s that took out the world’s relatively rudimentary telegraph system, which was a bummer. Nowadays, everything’s wired up, and we’ve got the Cloud and all that, so a big EMP (electromagnetic pulse) would be a very bad thing, as Mr K demonstrates.
Most of the story is told from the perspectives of a California tech billionaire ultra-survivalist brother, who has a bunker ready to go in the Arizona desert, and his semi-estranged sister in Illinois, who doesn’t. Stuff happens. Self discovery occurs, along with a sundry homicides and a whole mess o’ flesh wounds. The lights eventually come back on.
Reads like a screenplay. High octane, low believability. Will probably do well on Netflix.