The Shutouts
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.
The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.
Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they've spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.
At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.
Set in the world of Gabrielle Korn's Yours for the Taking, The Shutouts tells the captivating story of those who have been shut out from Inside, their fight to survive, and an interconnectedness larger than all of them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Korn revisits the dystopian world of Yours for the Taking in this tense tale of climate collapse, survival, and conspiracies. In 2041, nine years before the events of the first book, activist Kelly Turner writes letters to her adult daughter, explaining why she abandoned her as a little girl. Korn alternates between Kelly's story and that of Orchid, an older woman who's traveling in 2078 from Canada to the ruins of New York City to find her ex, Ava, one of the few selected to settle in tech guru Jacqueline Millender's climate-controlled tunnel network. As the reader soon learns, however, Ava has run away with her daughter, Brook, after learning the nefarious purpose of Jacqueline's project. Korn slowly reveals the connections between these characters as Kelly details her crusade against a government bent on discrediting scientists about climate change and Orchid and Ava grapple with unresolved questions from the past and constant dangers in the present. As in the first installment, the narrative is made harrowingly plausible by the author's skillful exploration of alarming choices made by people in power and survivors' attempts to forge communities. It's another winner from Korn.
