Author(s): Laura Van den Berg

Fiction

Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday... the dark of the Hospital at night. My mother's face, when she was young. Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine... what is a beginning and what is an end. Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. At once a hauntingly beautiful portrayal of a dystopian future and a powerful exploration of loneliness.