When she awoke, it was dead.In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth’s population—killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant—the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power—and the strong who possess it.A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men’s clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she’ll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.

    During that search, some of the men swore they heard a ghostly whistle echoing in the cold, Albertan dark. The only thing they found, however, was a lady’s hand fan with an Oriental design, spread wide like a butterfly’s wing.In the winter of 1910, just after a snowy sundown, the Leland Baxter gang, a collection of cattle thieves, gunmen, and cutthroats, wait on horses before a tunnel exit. They wait for the 5409, which secretly carries a train car full of railway cash—wages destined for workers of the copper and gold mines of British Columbia.A payroll they intend to robWhat they will discover, however, is that the approaching train isn’t the 5409. It’s the missing 311, the train only whispered about around dying campfires. A train that some believe still rides the iron rails, traveling to places no mortal should ever go, seeing things no one should ever see.Those men will climb aboard the 311… and will soon realize two sinister truths about the train.The 311 doesn’t ever stop.And no one ever gets off.

    As they remake the wilderness in their own image, planning for a future of settlement and civilization, the long-held bonds and secrets between the two will be tested, fractured and broken—and possibly healed.Fifty years from now, in the second half of the twenty-first century, climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power—and in a pivotal moment for the future of humanity, one of the company’s original founders will return to headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build.A thousand years in the future, North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier—and in a daring and seemingly impossible quest, sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.Hugely ambitious in scope and theme, Appleseed is the breakout novel from a writer “as self-assured as he is audacious” (NPR) who “may well have invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas” (Jess Walter). Part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, Appleseed is an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all.