World's Edge: A Mosaic Novel [Paperback]

A compelling call for compassion and resilience in the maw of social dissolution from literary legend James Sallis, master of many genres and Nebula, Edgar, and Shamus–nominated author of Drive

All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it.

In a not-so-distant future the United States has fragmented, balkanizing into unstable provinces often at war with one another, and Americans, their great promise not so much lost as forfeited, are encountering the terrors and devastation so much of the world daily lives with. Throughout a land littered with refugees, ruins, orphaned children, soldiers, militia, and fugitives, people go on about their daily lives as best they can.

The five linked stories of World’s Edge track the false starts and stall-outs of a nation and civilization trying to rise again, to rebuild, and of individuals caught up in that rebirthing. As ever, the only true history lies in the story of individual lives, in the old rag and bone shop of our hearts.Praise for World’s Edge

“Sallis’ tale, or tales, depends for its power on individual insights and a thematic throughline: Apart from all those unbridled conflicts, the nightmare future it presents sounds a great deal like this morning’s headlines. A supercut of videos and aphorisms that, like all dystopias, uses prophecies of tomorrow to raise hard questions about today.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A book of five linked stories, each an elegiac, quietly devastating postapocalyptic narrative l37