The Weathering

Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.

As in Ling Ma’s Severance and Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild.

Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.