Where The Ashes Find Their Grave

by Alanna Rusnak

462 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 7, 2026

About the author

Alanna was born in the wrong decade and dreams of abandoning everything to live in a van and travel across Canada. She’ll call it "a book tour," but it’s really an excuse to unleash her inner hippie.

A collector of typewriters and John Travolta VHS movies, she believes life is too short to not indulge in the things that bring you joy and in keeping with that philosophy, she left a stuffy office job of 18 years to launch a full-time indie press out of a chicken coop on her childhood property.

An author of literary and speculative fiction, Alanna likes to play in dark spaces, but always leaves room for redemption. Her latest novel is about burning down the world in order to set things right.

Settled in West Grey as a four-year-old, it has always been her home and source of inspiration and she’s working hard to build bridges between the various arts communities. With no immediate plans to abandon this, she will certainly leave it all behind the moment her husband gets on board with the van-life idea.

Reviews

[Jennifer Moffatt]

What I love about apocalyptic fiction is the way it invites us to wonder…what if? What if our world were to come crashing down? What if we were the last of humanity? Would we have what it takes to rebuild, to claw ourselves out of the ash, or would our basest human instincts take over in our fight for survival? Where the Ashes Find Their Grave, book two in Alanna Rusnak’s The Path That Takes Us Home series, explores these questions in the most satisfying way. The world has burned and, as the few survivors grapple with the destruction of everything they’ve ever known and loved, drowning in moments of unimaginable grief and sorrow, they must still move forward, propelled by the human will to survive…but they can’t escape the horror of unimaginable decisions that must be made and the building dread of facing their own likely, and ultimately inevitable, death. The characters wrestle with the balance of responsibility and desire—because if one fails, they all fail.

Rusnak layers real human moments of hope and joy amidst the horror, and reminds us of our own fragile and precious existence on this earth. It’s the details—the small ways in which we might reshape our lives amidst the chaos and destruction—that Rusnak nails with such breathtaking insight and imagination. This book builds from the momentum of the first and does everything I hoped it would do, and more. Book one blew up the world, book two asks how do we survive with what’s left? Rich, emotional, and insightful, Where the Ashes Find Their Grave is a story you don’t want to miss.

Thank you to the author for the advance copy.

[Michael]

This sequel was such a thoughtful continuation after the events of the first book. Not only learning about what happens after the events of the previous book, but also providing perspective to the events leading up to the first book. So much so that I'll be rereading the first book equipped with this new perspective.

I'm grateful for the inside look into the practical and emotional aftermath of the events in the first book. This book makes me rethink whether I'd want to survive a catastrophic event.