A chilling yet redemptive post-apocalyptic debut that examines community, motherhood, faith, and the importance of telling one's own story. When 95 percent of the earth's population disappears for no apparent reason, Mira does what she can to create some semblance of a life: She cobbles together a haphazard community named Zion, scavenges the Piles for supplies they might need, and avoids loving anyone she can't afford to lose. She has everything under control. Almost. Four years after the Rending, Mira's best friend, Lana, announces her pregnancy, the first since everything changed and a new source of hope for Mira. But when Lana gives birth to an inanimate object--and other women of Zion follow suit--the thin veil of normalcy Mira has thrown over her new life begins to fray. As the Zionites wrestle with the presence of these Babies, a confident outsider named Michael appears, proselytizing about the world beyond Zion. He lures Lana away and when she doesn't return, Mira must decide how much she's willing to let go in order to save her friend, her home, and her own fraught pregnancy. Like California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Rending and the Nest uses a fantastical, post-apocalyptic landscape to ask decidedly human questions: How well do we know the people we love? What sustains us in the midst of suffering? How do we forgive the brokenness we find within others--and within ourselves?

A chilling yet redemptive post-apocalyptic debut that examines community, motherhood, faith, and the importance of telling one's own story.

Schwehn's Tailings, is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable--part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer.