Next Stop
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Leave the World Behind and Exit West, an astonishingly resonant novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life through one family after a black hole consumes the State of Israel and similar strange events occur in major cities around the world, ushering in a time of chaos as well as miracles.
When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as similar anomalies spread across the globe, a conspiracy takes hold: will the holes swallow the Jews, or will they swallow the earth?
Against a backdrop of antisemitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city’s Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the unusual events, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Others leave for the south, forming militias and stockpiling weapons. But most, like Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael, stay and try to make their way amid the hostility and small joys of the ever-changing landscape.
But then thousands of commercial planes are sucked from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.
Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is an enthralling novel that explores the fault lines between our collective, national, and individual memories and how our deepest bonds can be unexpectedly reshaped in moments of crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Resnick debuts with a striking and unabashedly political fable set in an alternate present where the nation of Israel vanishes into a black hole. The story follows tech writer Ethan Block and magazine photographer Ella Halperin, who are raising Ella's young son, Michael, in an unnamed city loosely modeled on New York, where residents are dismayed by the First Event: Israel's disappearance. As other, smaller black holes form in cities around the world, "sucking in birds, clouds, light, sounds, Jews," some Jewish people feel a strong "pull" toward them, believing the holes provide an escape from persecution. Their migration to the holes causes others to scapegoat Jews for the black holes' existence. With antisemitism on the rise, Ethan and Ella are forced into a ghetto called "the Pale," where they try to get on with their lives ("No one talked much about what they saw or did not see"), until encroaching civil unrest compels them to make an irreversible decision for their and Michael's safety. Resnick skillfully uses the raw materials of postapocalyptic fiction and speaks lucidly to his Jewish characters' legacy of displacement. This timely tale will appeal to fans of speculative fantasies by Michael Chabon and Lavie Tidhar.
