Protect the family, best effort, no whining. That’s Papa’s rule. In the aftermath of a devastating pandemic known as the Pretty Pox, Arie McInnes and a small group of fellow survivors have been forced from the relative safety of an attic hideaway into the forest, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs. This second installment of August Ansel’s richly imagined post-apocalyptic series finds Arie and her ragtag family deep in the redwoods. Cold, hungry, and vulnerable, they’re determined to travel on foot to God’s Land—the troubled but familiar homestead in the hills where Arie was raised. The road home, though, is strange and arduous, littered with other survivors. Discovering which of them are allies—and which are not—is now a matter of life and death

“It’s worse than that. God will ignore us entirely.” A searing act of bioterrorism. A catastrophic plague they call the Pretty Pox. Most of the human race is dead, and for two years Arie McInnes has been alone, riding out the aftermath of the Pretty Pox, waiting for her own inevitable end. Hidden in the attic of her ruined home, Arie survives by wit and skill, ritual and habit. Convinced that humans are a dangerous fluke, a problematic species best allowed to expire, she chooses solitude… even in matters of life and death. Arie’s precarious world is upended when her youngest brother—a man she’s never met—appears out of nowhere with a badly injured woman. Their presence in the attic draws the attention of a dark watcher in the woods, and Arie is forced to choose between the narrow beliefs that have sustained her and the stubborn instinct to love and protect. In Book One of August Ansel’s captivating new post-apocalyptic series, After the Pretty Pox casts an unwavering eye on what it means to be human in a world where nature has the upper hand, and the only rules left to live by—for good or ill—are the ones written on our hearts