Aurora
A Novel
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4.2 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Fantastic story, a real page-turner. Impossible to put down." – Stephen King
From the author of Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Under the Dome or Project Hail Mary, in which a worldwide cataclysm plays out in the lives of one complicated Midwestern family.
In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son.
Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.
Across the country lives Aubrey’s estranged brother, Thom. A fantastically wealthy, neurotically over-prepared Silicon Valley CEO, he plans to ride out the crisis in a gilded desert bunker he built for maximum comfort and security.
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 several long-overdue reckonings—which not everyone will survive . . .
Aurora is suspenseful storytelling—both large scale and small—at its finest.
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.
