âWhatâs after Armageddon? No government, no laws, no infrastructure, no oil, no industryâĻand sometimes a sense of relief. In Kunstlerâs richly imagined World Made by Hand, the bone-weary denizens of Union GroveâĻmanage to plant a few seeds of human decency that bear fruit.â âCathleen Medwick, Oprah Daily
For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Following a cascading set of catastrophesâthe end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemicsâthey are doing whatever they can to get by. The outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people arenât sure. The townspeopleâs challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields, and riversâno longer pollutedâreplenished with fish.
Celebrated cultural critic and author of the runaway nonfiction bestseller The Long Emergency James Howard Kunstler returns with the World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades from now. This extraordinary novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, cements Kunstlerâs place as an important voice in the debate over our countryâs future.