An unforgettable portrait of a society in freefall, and finding humanity even at the end of it all. Darkly beautiful, bursting with soul and imagination, this stunning sci-fi debut is Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles meets Ted Chiang meets Melancholia, for the literary reader who loves genre-busting, speculative character-driven dramas set “five minutes into the future.”

THE WORLD GIVES WAY
by Marissa Levien
Redhook/Hachette US, September 2021

THE WORLD GIVES WAY is set on a generation ship carrying those wealthy enough have escaped Earth—and the contract workers bound to serve them for the ship’s two-hundred-year journey. Myrra Dal was born an indentured worker on this ship, but her generation will live to see the journey’s end and the expiration of their contracts; she just has to spend the next fifty years serving the powerful Carlyles first. But when Myrra discovers the catastrophic secret the elites have been harboring, everything changes. There’s a crack in the ship’s hull, and everyone on board has two months left to live—if that. Burdened with the secret of a lifetime, and the Carlyles’ infant daughter, she runs—but someone is hot on her trail, and not even the end of the world can stop him.

Marissa Levien is a recent graduate of Stony Brook University’s MFA program. Her work has been published in Slice, LARB PubLab, The Toast, and featured on Glimmer Train‘s Honorable Mentions List. She lives in New York.