98.2

by Alexander Francis

In Eden, Washington, there are rules. Wear a facemask. Be home by curfew. And, most importantly, wash your hands. This is Emily's normal. Growing up in the fifty-year wake of a global health pandemic, Emily has never known any different. However, now that she is sixteen, the world is starting to look different. A new friendship is opening her eyes to life before the global pandemic and, as she learns more about the past, she grows even more frustrated with her present. Emily begins to see small fractures in the daily habits and routines that have come to define her existence. Risking the quiet comforts of normalcy, Emily's curiosity takes hold and she begins to step outside of everyday life in Eden.

Fifty-two years earlier, Sam is returning to campus for his final semester at St. Agatha University. Greeting old friends and preparing for graduation, Sam is wrestling with the excitement and sadness that comes with closing the door on his college years. However, his senior year is cut short when a horrible virus sweeps the globe and life is brought to a screeching halt. The virus changes everything and Sam struggles to adjust to life in the pandemic. Wear a facemask. Be home by curfew. And, most importantly, wash your hands. This is Sam's new normal.

Two sides of the same coin, Sam and Emily are desperately searching for answers. But, at what cost?

300 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2020

About the author

Alexander Francis is the author of thirteen novels spanning psychological suspense, spy thrillers, literary fiction, time travel, and romance, each one written in a distinct voice, each one shaped by the same belief: that fiction should make you feel something you were not expecting to feel.

Two of his novels, Beware the Exit and Memory Gap, were born from dreams. He woke, wrote down what remained, and built full novels from those fragments. The result, in both cases, is fiction with the logic and texture of a waking dream: internally consistent, emotionally real, and deeply strange.

His Mick Grundy trilogy, Spy Hunt, The Russian Connection, and Elapid — follows a single unforgettable protagonist through three standalone spy thrillers. Readers have compared Mick Grundy to Jason Bourne and Denzel Washington's character in The Equalizer, and one reader bought the trilogy twice: once to keep, and once to donate to his local library so strangers could find it.

His work has been described as impossible to categorize: one reader compared him to Stravinsky, too original for the existing categories to contain. His books are available in ebook, paperback, large print, and audiobook formats, and are distributed internationally.

His biggest thrill, still, is hearing from a reader who enjoyed one of his books.

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes

[Alex McAuliffe]

Alexandre’s authorial debut is an ominous blending of our own world and a dystopian Other, unfolding two parallel lives a half-century apart. Sam is a college student living through the onset of last spring’s pandemic; Emily is a high school student in a command society rigidly organized by the pandemic and its aftermath. Alexandre relies too heavily on his audience’s visceral personal experiences of the past year, painting the conditions of his characters only in allusive strokes; nevertheless, I am impressed at his ability to reckon with his own feelings throughout the beginning of our plague year fully enough to venture such a story so soon. As this year progresses and we overcome the suffering and fear that COVID and the public response to it wrought, I am optimistic that his pandemic duration will be “wrong” by at least fifty years. Yet his book will remain an admirable attempt to capture the dreads and sinking disorganization of the moments when all our easy assumptions of normalcy and the pursuit of happiness evaporated into calculations of risk, safety and “social distance”.