From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend comes a moving and eerily relevant novel that imagines the aftermath of a pandemic virus as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny.
His family's sole survivor after a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide, Cole Vining is lucky to have found refuge with the evangelical Pastor Wyatt and his wife in a small town in southern Indiana. As the world outside has grown increasingly anarchic, Salvation City has been spared much of the devastation, and its residents have renewed their preparations for the Rapture.
Grateful for the shelter and love of his foster family (and relieved to have been saved from the horrid, overrun orphanages that have sprung up around the country), Cole begins to form relationships within the larger community. But despite his affection for this place, he struggles with memories of the very different world in which he was reared. Is there room to love both Wyatt and his parents? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and the new life to come through the imminent Rapture, Cole begins to conceive of a different future for himself, one in which his own dreams of heroism seem within reach.
Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style,
Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, weaving the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on the meaning of belief and heroism.
Quote: In an America devastated by a flu pandemic, orphaned thirteen-year-old Cole 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’
