40 - Paperback

by Alan Heathcock (Author)

From the award-winning author Alan Heathcock comes an American myth of the future: a vision of civil war, spectacle, and disaster of biblical proportions.

In a future America ravaged by natural disaster, pandemic, and political unrest, a fundamentalist faction emerges. As the Novae Terrae gain power, enticing civilians with bread and circuses, a civil war breaks out between its members and the U.S. government.

Mazzy Goodwin, a young soldier, wants only to find her little sister, Ava Lynn. One day, she wakes in a bomb crater to find wings have sprouted from her back. Has she died? Been given wings by God? Undergone a military experiment?

The world sees a miracle. Mazzy is coaxed into seeing it as an opportunity: to become the angel-like figurehead of the revolution in return for being reunited with her sister. Her journey leads her to New Los Angeles, where the Novae have set up the headquarters for their propaganda machine--right in the ruins of Hollywood. Aided by friends old and new, she must navigate a web of deceit while staying true to herself.

Told in sharp, haunting prose as cinematic as it is precise, Alan Heathcock's 40 is a dizzyingly fantastical novel about the dangers of blind faith, the temptation of spectacle, and the love of family. In a tale by turns mythic and tragic, one heroine must come to terms with the consequences of her decisions and face the challenges of building a new world.

Author Biography

Alan Heathcock has won a Whiting Award and a National Magazine Award, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His story collection Volt was selected as a best book of the year by numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Chicago Tribune; was named a New York Times Editors' Choice; and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.