America City

By Chris Beckett

FICTION

368 Pages, 5 x 8

Formats: Trade Paper

Trade Paper, $15.95 (US $15.95) (CA $20.95)

Publication Date: March 2019

ISBN 9781786491541

Rights: US & CA

Atlantic Books, Ltd. (Mar 2019)
Atlantic Books

Price:	$15.95

Overview

From an Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author comes a compelling dystopic look at the U.S. a century in the future

A nation divided by climate, stories will determine its fate. One century from now, a changed climate is forcing mass migrations across America. As tensions rise between north and south, publicist Holly Peacock finds herself working for Senator Slaymaker, a politician determined to unite the country.

But as Slaymaker launches a bid for the presidency, Holly discovers that winning hearts and minds in the whisperstream—where stories are everything and truth counts for little—may come at a devastating cost. Can she help him bring America together, or will their campaign set the nation on an irreversible path to self-destruction?

For readers of speculative fiction and political thrillers, America City explores the future of American identity in the face of environmental crisis. Will ambition and manipulation triumph, or can empathy and understanding still prevail?

Reviews

"An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent. . . . Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed." —Guardian

"America City is beautifully written, inventive, with a strong cast of characters . . . and a plot that makes the reader think, and is another great book from one of the best writers around." —Concatenation

"Compelling . . . a grim demonstration of how one person can change history, but not control it." —SFX

"Whilst America City could be called a climate-change novel, it is much more than that. The droughts, storms, and floods provide the context in which questions about identity, crafting story, creating and manipulating political events and policy, and exploring tensions in friendships and relationships, occur. It is an intelligent and compelling novel which through well-plotted story—and complex, believable, and interesting characters—explores one possible scenario, and in the process introduces its various and rather more universal themes. . . . America City bears comparison with another, recent, brilliant novel focused on climate change in twenty-second-century America: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, also published in 2017. . . . Both are expertly written in their different approaches." —Strange Horizons

"Readers looking for a new and hauntingly realistic dystopia will find plenty to enjoy, question, and ponder." --Publishers Weekly

Author Biography

Chris Beckett is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for "The Turing Test," the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.

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