40
Released August 2nd, 2022
From the award-winning author Alan Heathcock comes an American myth of the future: a vision of civil war, spectacle, and disaster of biblical proportions.
In a future America ravaged by natural disaster, pandemic, and political unrest, a fundamentalist faction emerges. As the Novae Terrae gain power, enticing civilians with bread and circuses, a civil war breaks out between its members and the US government.
Mazzy Goodwin, a young soldier, only wants to find her little sister, Ava Lynn. One day, she wakes in a bomb crater to find wings emerged from her back. Has she died? Been gifted wings by God? Undergone a military experiment?
What Others Are Saying About 40…
With 40, Alan Heathcock has come blazing into the novel form, giving us an original mythos, a tour de force of metamorphosis and survival. If an angry Flannery O’Connor wrote post-apocalyptic fiction with a pen of fire, it might look something like this.
– Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Great Believers
Shaped from foreboding, almost neo-biblical prose, 40 is a fast-paced vision of a shattered American future: a place of violent factions, barbaric pageantry, remote-control rain, and angels made real. Heathcock has created a speculative thriller that glitters with imagination and glows with heart.
– Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land
Forged amidst the ashes and blood of climate catastrophe, 40 invokes a genre-busting Wild West where faith and war and family converge with razor sharp prose, volleying to become a compass for an uncertain future. These words will cut deep into your soul and fill it with angelic feathers and the detritus of a dying world—often beautiful and horrific at once. You can try to corral 40 at a roundtable of Paolo Bacigalupi, Angela Carter, and Cormac McCarthy, but this is a near future prophecy that is chiefly Heathcockian.
— Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
More about the author
Alan Heathcock has won a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a National Magazine Award, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
His story collection, VOLT, was a ‘Best Book of the Year’ selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Chicago Tribune, was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize.
ALAN HEATHCOCK 