Salvation City
-
- 3,99 €
-
- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, the moving and eerily relevant novel that imagines the aftermath of a flu pandemic as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny.
In an America devastated by a flu pandemic, orphaned thirteen-year-old C ole finds safety and stability with an evangelical pastor and his wife. Happiness becomes disquiet as he realises the cost at which this peace comes, and the extent to which it challenges everything he knows.
Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, blending a deeply affecting portrait of one young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on belief, heroism, and the true meaning of salvation.
'A tale of an American near-apocalypse that ... reads beautifully, at time joyously, and makes one reconsider the ordering of our world' Gary Shteyngart
'Not only timely and thought-provoking but also generous in its understanding of human nature. When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my lifeboat' Vanity Fair
'Nunez's writing is gorgeously spare, and she gets the life and the lingo of a teenage boy just right.... A gorgeously strange novel' Boston Globe
'A satisfying, provocative and very plausible novel' Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
'A wise and richly humane coming-of-age novel' O Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The intellectually rigorous and grimly prophetic latest from Nunez (The Last of Her Kind) initially resembles any number of coming-of-age yarns, except that most adolescences don't coincide with apocalyptic flu pandemics and the rise of insular church-cities. Cole Vining, however, is not so fortunate: already struggling with a relocation from Chicago to penny-ante Indiana and the mystery of sexual desire, the near destruction of the human race (Cole's parents among them) launches Cole into a rudderless future of nightmarish orphanages and angelic "rapture children." Rescued by the charismatic and deceptive Pastor Wyatt, Cole is brought to Salvation City, a Christian Mission closed off from the crumbling world. There, Cole's education will resume with religious indoctrination in place of his parents' secular cynicism, and his evolving sense of self will collide with the corruption and hypocrisy lurking beneath Salvation's sanctified facade. The great success of Nunez's book is that the end of the world is filtered through Cole's imperfect perspective, so that the collapse of society is no more devastating than first love, and deeply felt conflict rages as a young man tries to find something worth preserving in a place determined to obliterate the past.