Kirjahaku

With his best and craziest days behind him, a Florida call center employee struggles through mind-numbing drudgery day after day--but he just might have a way to reclaim the madness and his former life. The zombie apocalypse is over. The humans have won. Life is back to normal. And Rip is bored as hell. It's not much of a life sitting in a call center in the poor town of Spanish Shanty, Florida, answering emails like a drone and listening to customer complaints. Rip was ruler of a tiny kingdom in the Lazy River waterpark, killing zombies by day and making passionate love at night. He misses the danger, the camaraderie, and the blistering love he once knew. He longs to feel Santana--his trusty machete--in his hand, and Davia--the fiercest woman alive--in his arms once again. He can still picture it-- life on the razor's edge--and he would do anything to get that feeling back. But what if Rip could get it back? He's totally desperate. Not normal desperate--more like ready-to-restart-the-apocalypse desperate. Condemning humanity to a repeat merely for an adrenaline rush is probably not a good idea. But life at the call center is nothing more than a slow death, and Rip might not be able to go on without trying to find out.

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.