Salvation City

After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what those around him believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell? During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero.Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art. It is about belief-belief in God and belief in self. As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and a new life to come through an imminent rapture, Cole imagines a different future, one in which his own dreams of happiness and heroism begin to seem within reach.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Last of Her Kind comes a breakout novel that imagines the aftermath of pandemic flu, as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy who is uncertain of his destiny.

Sigrid Nunez is the author of several novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award; Naked Sleeper; and The Last of Her Kind. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature. Sigrid has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, and the New School, and she has been a visiting writer at Washington University, Baruch College, and the University of California, Irvine. She lives in New York City. Stephen Hoye has won thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards, including one for the New York Times bestseller Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki. A graduate of London's Guildhall and a veteran of London's West End, Stephen has recorded many other notable titles, such as Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong and The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.