After America
From Publishers Weekly
In this sequel to Without Warning, Birmingham delivers a stirring account of the events after "the Disappearance," tracking a group of survivors in New York, Seattle, Texas, Kansas City, Berlin, Salisbury, and London. Shortly before the Iraq War, a wave of unknown energy passes over most of North America, scouring humanity and triggering chaos. Now the wave is gone, and the survivors face the challenges of rebuilding their empty continents. In the Texas Administrative Division, an ex-general wages a war of ethnic cleansing against the new immigrants coming in search of opportunity; in New York, hoards of scavengers pick through the ruins of the city. Meanwhile, over a billion Muslims are left homeless after Israeli nukes make the Middle East uninhabitable, and they need somewhere to live. As American forces attempt to retake the East Coast, an inexperienced president finds his leadership tested. Though his dialogue often feels functional or formulaic, Birmingham's inspired speculation is ingenious and engrossing. Along with colorful if not entirely sympathetic characters and a wicked sense of the absurd, this should make excellent pool-side reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Now, three years later, a skeleton U.S. government headquartered in Seattle directs the reconstruction of an entire nation—and the battle for New York City has begun.
Pirates and foreign militias are swarming the East Coast, taking everything they can. The president comes to the Declared Security Zone of New York and barely survives the visit. The enemy—whoever they are—controls Manhattan’s concrete canyons and the abandoned flatlands of Long Island. The U.S. military, struggling with sketchy communications and a lack of supplies, is mired in a nightmare of urban combat.
Caught up in the violence is a Polish-born sergeant who watches the carnage through the eyes of an intellectual and with the heart of a warrior. Two smugglers, the highborn Lady Julianne Balwyn and her brawny partner Rhino, search for a treasure whose key lies inside an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. Thousands of miles away, a rogue general leads the secession of Texas and a brutal campaign against immigrants, while Miguel Pieraro, a Mexican-born rancher, fights back. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent is called into a violent shadow war against an enemy that has come after her and her family.
The president is a stranger to the military mindset, but now this mild-mannered city engineer from the Pacific Northwest needs to make a soldier’s choice. With New York clutched in the grip of thousands of heavily armed predators, is an all-out attack on the city the only way to save it?
From the geopolitics of post-American dominance to the fallout of Israel’s nuclear strike, After America provides a gripping, intelligent, and harrowing chronicle of a world in the maw of chaos—and lives lived in the dangerous dawn of a strange new future.
New Moon
SUMMARY: Now in a Special Trade Demy Paperback Edition. The dramatic sequel to TWILIGHT, following the tale of Bella, a teenage girl whose love for a vampire gets her into trouble. I stuck my finger under the edge of the paper and jerked it under the tape. 'Shoot,' I muttered when the paper sliced my finger. A single drop of blood oozed from the tiny cut. It all happened very quickly then. 'No!' Edward roared... Dazed and disorientated, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm - and into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is more dangerous than Bella ever could have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of an evil vampire but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realise their troubles may just be beginning...