Ember

by Brock Adams

Overview

Three years ago, the sun began to die. In a desperate attempt to reignite the failing star, the United States had joined the rest of the planet in unloading its nuclear arsenal at the flickering ember. The missiles burst from silos in Wyoming and Bangladesh, cocooning the earth in tendrils of smoke as they began their two-and-a-half year journey into space. When they finally reach their target, it’s thirty degrees in July and getting colder. Lisa and her husband, Guy, sit shivering on a Southern hilltop, watching as humanity’s last hope at survival shimmers faintly...and then disappears below the horizon.
A group of militant rebels called the Minutemen take advantage of the ensuing chaos to knock out power grids, cloaking the freezing earth in near darkness. Seizing control. To escape this ruthless new world order, Lisa and Guy join a reluctant band of refugees crossing the snow-covered South in search of shelter and answers. From an icy parking lot in Atlanta to the Minutemen’s makeshift headquarters at Asheville’s Biltmore Estate, only one thing is certain: in a world with little light, nothing is guaranteed—least of all survival.

Ember is the 2016 winner of the South Carolina First Novel Prize as judged by novelist Bridgett M. Davis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235320
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Brock Adams is a teaches English and creative writing at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He has published stories in Sewanee Review, Best American Mystery Stories, Barrelhouse, Acapella Zoo, and elsewhere. His book of stories, Gulf, was published by Pocol Press in 2010. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Florida.

Interviews

"With fascinating concept and a shocking twist, Ember is an eerie apocalypse that will keep you guessing until the end."

Editorial Reviews

07/17/2017
In Adams’s gripping postapocalyptic thriller, the sun’s unexplained weakening leads to a precipitously cooling world. A plot to reignite the star with nuclear weapons only causes a massive solar flare that knocks out all power. Taking advantage of the moment of confusion, a survivalist group calling themselves the Minutemen violently takes over. Their agenda includes a strict patriarchy, decentralized government, heavily armed self-sufficiency, and reeducation of children in a radical version of personal liberty. They demand that all who oppose them move to large cities. The revolution exposes overly cautious Guy’s infidelity, when he insists to Lisa they cannot flee South Carolina without his mistress Heather. Their delay in leaving requires the trio to kill their way to Atlanta. In their flight, Guy dies in an attack, leaving the two women to seek community and stability on their own. They straggle to Atlanta, then Asheville, N.C., and then a betrayal separates them. As their paths diverge, hardened, practical Lisa and immature Heather offer divergent images of how women could survive in such a hostile future. While Adams (Gulf) writes very tense action sequences, the situations his characters find themselves in feel much too improbable. Nevertheless, this terrifying spin on the possibilities of extreme rhetoric will chill readers with its bleak image of the failure of humanity and the futility of fighting massive climate change. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"A page-turning apocalyptic tale and promising debut novel."

Booklist

"With fascinating concept and a shocking twist, Ember is an eerie apocalypse that will keep you guessing until the end."

Katherine Arden

"Against a haunting, apocalyptic southern landscape, and with a panoply of rich characterizations, this beautiful novel is a cautionary tale about the power-hungry who rise from the ashes of a lost and dying world. With page-turning twists, the writer makes us care deeply about the small band of survivors making their way against violence and fear and the unknown – toward a brave new world. Emberbegins with a small, glowing flame of intrigue and originality, then grows into a fireball of dazzling plot and prose, bursting into a literary tour de force."

Bridgett M. Davis

"Ember burns with imagination and wrestles with chaos, and combines these two to create a visionary novel of a world gone mad, where the line between good and bad is smeared with gray, and hopeful points of light rage against the darkness."

Michael Farris Smith

Adams has adeptly put trust, love and faith to the test. With climate change and global warming a growing concern, Ember is a chilling scenario.

Shelf Awareness

"A page-turning apocalyptic tale and promising debut novel."

Booklist

09/01/2017
In Adams's debut, the winner of the 2016 South Carolina First Novel Prize, the sun is dying. Countries around the world launch their nuclear arsenals in an effort to jump-start the fading star. The sun's death illustrates just how quickly a civilized nation can degenerate into desperate enclaves of people struggling to survive at any cost. The bogeymen here are Minutemen, armed militant rebels who seize power from what's left of the government. Guy and Lisa, a married couple, and Heather, a single woman, try to escape the Minutemen, but even in a world with no sun, there's nowhere to hide. The narrative's alternating, limited third-person points of view allow Adams to illustrate just how fragile and thin the veneer of society truly is. VERDICT Readers who enjoy dystopian worlds, quick pacing, sympathetic if flawed protagonists, and compelling prose will want this end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it adventure.—Charli Osborne, Oak Park P. L., MI

Library Journal

2017-06-20
The sun has fizzled down to an ember and the human race is left to figure out how to survive the frozen new world in Adams' (Gulf, 2010) dystopian debut novel.A somewhat happily married couple, Guy and Lisa are holed up with their dog, Jemi, trying to keep warm in a South Carolina summer that barely gets above freezing. The sun is so close to disappearing most people just call it "the ember," and mankind's last-ditch effort to start it back up is to fire an arsenal of nuclear weapons into the center. The resulting solar aurora periodically disrupts the Earth's power grid, but it always comes back on until one day it doesn't, and as the sun doesn't seem to be regaining its strength either, civil society begins to crack. When a menacing group called the Minutemen begins to flex its strength, Guy and Lisa have to navigate the growing chaos as best they can. As they join forces with other refugees, it looks less and less likely that the nuclear plan worked or that the power will ever come back on—and another brutal winter gets closer every day. The prose flows well enough and the feeling of growing suspense provides adequate tension for a dystopian thriller. But it's hard not to imagine how things might have been if the author had delved deeper into the worldbuilding he's only hinted at here and given the characters more complexity than the same tired tropes of marital fissure that are used so often in fiction. A good-enough survival thriller that doesn't disappoint so much as it fails to truly impress.

Kirkus Reviews