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Tribulation: A Novel of the Near Future
When Brian Trent calls his retired father, on an evening in the near future, to say, “We’re going to the Farm,” his father William reacts with alarm. Because Brian, a top reporter for The Washington Post, is really saying that he believes the country’s economy is about to crash, and that he and his family are heading for a sanctuary they’ve prepared in the mountains of West Virginia. William does not believe that America could come apart. Until he sees it start to happen, with unbelievable speed, the very next day.
Tribulation: A Novel of the Near Future follows the remarkable and troubled Trent family as they try to find their way through the ultimate collapse. Kathryn, Brian’s wife, just wants to live a normal life, and hates what Brian has been putting the family through to try to prepare for catastrophe. Too late, she finds out that clinging to normality in an unhinged world can get you killed. Daniel and Julie Trent are normal teenagers who are about to be challenged beyond anything they have ever imagined (losing cell phone service and the Internet is only the beginning). And then there’s William, the powerful patriarch, a skeptic about the prospects of collapse right to the end, who then becomes determined not only to survive against all odds, and to keep his family alive, but to find a better way of life on the other side.
In the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World, Tribulation takes a brutally realistic look at the possibilities of the near future in order to illuminate the trends of our time.
Tribulation: A Novel of the Near Future follows the remarkable and troubled Trent family as they try to find their way through the ultimate collapse. Kathryn, Brian’s wife, just wants to live a normal life, and hates what Brian has been putting the family through to try to prepare for catastrophe. Too late, she finds out that clinging to normality in an unhinged world can get you killed. Daniel and Julie Trent are normal teenagers who are about to be challenged beyond anything they have ever imagined (losing cell phone service and the Internet is only the beginning). And then there’s William, the powerful patriarch, a skeptic about the prospects of collapse right to the end, who then becomes determined not only to survive against all odds, and to keep his family alive, but to find a better way of life on the other side.
In the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World, Tribulation takes a brutally realistic look at the possibilities of the near future in order to illuminate the trends of our time.
250 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 23, 2014
About the author
Thomas A. Lewis
28 books1 followerThomas A. Lewis is a veteran journalist (National Wildlife, Smithsonian magazines) and broadcaster (Voice of America) who has written six non-fiction books, two of which received favorable critical attention nationwide. He became alarmed about the state of the environment while working as the executive editor of the Time-Life Books 16-volume series on the earth sciences, “Planet Earth,” and later when, as roving editor for National Wildlife Magazine, he traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica to chronicle the distress of animals and their ecosystems.
It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age -- and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it.
He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”
It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age -- and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it.
He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”
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November 6, 2014
Surprisingly good. I know I'm going to be one of the millions who die in an event like the one described in this book, but I still like reading about (fictional) people who make it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review