Salvation City

Sigrid Nunez

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