Last Exit
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the co-author of the bestselling This Is How You Lose the Time War.
Gaiman's American Gods meets King's The Dark Tower in this electric, captivating road trip across America and alternate realities to stop the apocalypse, from a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author.
Imagine that the American highway system is a vast magical network binding city to city. By soaking up magic from intentionally directionless travel, initiates can slip into alternate realities. Stray too far from our America, though, and things get weird. And dangerous. And terrifying.
When visionary mathematician Zelda Qiang was in college, she learned how to travel from one alternate reality to another. Her response was to take her friends on a road trip to strange new worlds. Six of them set out. Only five returned. Zelda's lover, Sal, betrayed them: she walked into the jags―sharp cutting shadows like cracks in space―and didn't come back.
Now Zelda still walks the road alone, a wandering magus keeping the jags from breaking through. But now Sal is coming back―with Dark Things in tow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
College students discover they can manipulate the inherent uncertainties of reality to step into alternate universes in the brilliant latest from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gladstone (This Is How You Lose the Time War, written with Amal El-Mohtar). Heroine Zelda and her friends use this "knack" to search for a better world, one "where history turned out different." Instead, they find the rot, a hungry evil that devours every world it touches—and, in a terrible miscalculation, Zelda's lover, Sal, is lost to the rot. Ten years later, Zelda's on the road, alone, and working to stamp out the rot wherever it creeps into her world. When Sal's 17-year-old cousin, June, demands answers about what really happened to Sal, Zelda takes June into an "alt"—and discovers that Sal, or whatever she's become, is coming home. Now Zelda must bring her old friends back together to travel to the Crossroads, where worlds meet, in hopes of sealing off the rot forever. Gladstone weaves magic and mathematics in vivid and poetic prose. There's a wonderful diversity of characters and relationships, with deep insight on how the characters' differing traumas and marginalizations influence what they want out of the alternate worlds. The result blends fantasy, horror, and science fiction to produce a stunning, insightful novel that wants a better world just as much as its protagonists do.
