Publicity Contact:
Kimberly Burns
212-226-0981 DIRECT
917-405-8708 MOBILE
kb@kimberlyburnspr.com
Salvation City, a novel
(Riverhead Books, Coming September 2010)
After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what those around him believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell? During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero.
Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art. It is about belief—belief in God and belief in self. As others around him grow increasingly fixed on the hope of salvation and a new life to come through an imminent rapture, Cole imagines a different future, one in which his own dreams of happiness and heroism begin to seem within reach.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SALVATION CITY:
“Sigrid Nunez has long been one of my favorite authors because she writes with the deepest intelligence, the truest heart, and the most surprising sense of humor. Salvation City is a tale of an American near-apocalypse that brings out the best of all these qualities. It reads beautifully, at time joyously, and it makes one reconsider the ordering of our world.”
Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story
“Salvation City is a wonderful, great-hearted novel that finds love and hope in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Cole Vining is a latter-day Huck Finn, and we grieve and cheer for him as he makes his journey, both physical and spiritual, through a devastated world.”
Ron Rash, author of Serena
PRAISE FROM EARLY REVIEWS:
"Adept at matching psychological intricacy with edge-of-your-seat plots, the versatile Nunez gracefully entwines a classic coming-of-age story with a terrifying medical catastrophe and a profound battle between secular and religious viewpoints…. Nunez brilliantly contrasts epic social failure and tragedy with the unfurling of one promising life, reminding us that even in the worst of times, we seek coherence, discovery, and connection."
Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Class … is Nunez's preoccupation, and she handles it with fine-tuned irony and no small measure of profundity."
Kirkus Reviews
"Intellectually rigorous … prophetic …. The great success of Nunez's book is that the end of the world is filtered through Cole's imperfect perspective, so that the collapse of society is no more devastating than first love, and deeply felt conflict rages as a young man tries to find something worth preserving in a place determined to obliterate the past."
Publishers Weekly
"Nunez has a deft hand with her narrator's simple prose … and exposes profound questions. A good choice for all contemporary fiction readers. Fans of Cormac McCarthy's The Road will find similar themes…"
Library Journal