Salvation City - 9781594487668

"Sigrid Nunez has long been one of my favorite authors, because she writes with the deepest intelligence, the truest heart, and the most surpising sense of humor. Salvation City, a tale of an American near-apocalypse, brings out the best of all these qualities. It reads beautifully, at times joyously, and it makes one reconsider the ordering of our world."-Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

"Salvation City is a wonderful, great-hearted novel that finds love and hope in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Cole Vining is a latter-day Huck Finn, and we grieve and cheer for him as he makes his journey, both physical and spiritual, through a devastated world."-Ron Rash, author of Serena

"Nunez, one of the most dizzyingly accomplished of our writers, delivers that rarely spotted animal, a literary drama about families that is also a page-turner."-The New York Times Book Reveiw

"Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity."-The New Yorker

"Nunez's voice is unflinching and intimate."-Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"This is a brilliant, dazzling, daring novel."-O: The Oprah Magazine

"Refreshingly impatient with the conventions of fiction, Nunez is capable of upending our expectations to powerful ends."-Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books

After a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people around the world, the United States has grown increasingly anarchic. Countless children are stranded in orphanages, and many of the systems that we take for granted have broken down. When thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is rescued from an orphanage by an evangelical pastor and his young wife, he knows he is one of the lucky ones. Salvation City, the small southern Indiana town where they live, has been spared much of the outside world's devastation.

In Salvation City, Cole feels sheltered and loved, but never as if he truly belongs. Everything is starkly different from the life he once shared with his parents. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the pastùa struggle made more difficult by the fact that he lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what his new friends and family believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell?

As those around him become increasingly dedicated to their own visions of utopia, Cole begins to imagine a wholly different future for himself.

Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style, Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, blending the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on belief, heroism, and the true meaning of salvation.