After the Fall

So much is forgotten in the Republic: the way the seasons used to turn like pages in a book, the technology that once made life easy for everyone, even the art of reading. For fifteen-year-old June, the forgetting goes even deeper, ever since a mysterious accident six years ago stole her mother and her memory. When a strange circus with ties to her family comes through town, she follows them without a second thought. In the outside world, June has to navigate a landscape and society pushed to the edge by the powerful forces of climate change, and to decide who she can trust in a world where everyone seems to have secrets. Can she believe the grizzled deputy who somehow knows more about her past than she does? What about the circus performers, who push her away even as they beguile her best friend? Only when she finally uncovers a truth that threatens to change the Republic forever, will she know who her true family is— and whose life is worth saving.

Ellen Parent has been telling stories since the mid-nineties, when she started whispering them down to her sister on the bottom bunk. Her poetry has been published in Bloodroot, Vermont Magazine, Birchsong, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Vermont Writers Prize. After the Fall is her first novel. She lives in rural Vermont with her delightful husband, her precocious daughter, and two eccentric cats.