Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the novels How High We Go in the Dark and Girl Zero, and the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone.
At Electric Lit he tagged seven novels which
deal with a world changing event (a viral pandemic or something just as significant), but for all the background nods to cataclysm, these wildly inventive and deeply affecting stories ultimately focus on what it means to be human, what it means to be part of a community and the world at large.One title on the list:
A Beginning at the End by Mike ChenRead about the other entries on the list.
Set in a world six years after a devastating pandemic, the novel starts with three characters in a recovering San Francisco: a widowed father raising a daughter, a famous musician whose fame is kept underwraps, and a wedding planner. In this world, trauma and anxiety (Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder) take center stage where people are not ready or willing to seek out new connections and form families to the degree that a Family Stability Board is created to protect a precious resource: children. When this Board threatens to take Sunny (the daughter) away from Rob (her father), hard truths about the past are revealed which leads Sunny to run away. The following journey of the book’s primary characters in search of Sunny provides a post-apocalyptic canvas for interrogating each character’s past and how they are moving through trauma through their newfound connections.
A Beginning at the End is among Publishers Weekly's thirteen essential pandemic novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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