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{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download California by Edan Lepucki The Book We're Talking About: 'California' By Edan Lepucki. What we think: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” Joan Didion wrote in “Los Angeles Notebook,” an essay using the Santa Ana phenomenon as a metaphor for California’s apocalyptic state. She continues, “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.” She quotes Nathaniel West and Raymond Carver to accentuate her point, which is: California is the ideal setting for a story about the end of the world. Edan Lepucki must’ve agreed, as she chose to set her debut novel there. You might’ve heard about California from Stephen Colbert. It publishes with Little, Brown next week, an imprint under the Hachette umbrella, and thus was swept up in the most recent Amazon ruckus. Colbert’s book, too, was a victim of Amazon’s decision to remove Hachette titles from their site, so he’s taken it upon himself to encourage viewers to pick up Lepucki’s title -- a dystopian romp through a suddenly rural California -- at an independent bookstore. The story opens with Cal and Frida, a couple that has chosen to flee Los Angeles, one of many American cities that has fallen to shambles due to a sudden oil crisis and a slew of global warming-related natural disasters. As a result, the very wealthy have migrated to cloistered “Communities,” where they have highly coveted Internet access, among other luxuries. The rest of the country either lives in squalor in drug-addled former cities, or off the grid, as Cal and Frida have opted to do. The couple met through Frida’s brother, Cal’s roommate at a progressive two-year college with a clearly defined philosophy: “the field and the book, a symbiotic relationship.” Students were taught to grow tomatoes and debate Derrida in equal measure. After graduation, Micah, always a prankster, joins a performance art group that aims to protest the Communities and other capitalistic endeavors. When one of his demonstrations is taken too far, Cal and Frida believe they’ve lost him forever. After venturing away from the city that had become their home, Frida and Cal set up camp in a shack, and begin a routine of hunting, foraging, gardening, and otherwise lazing and lusting away their time. While Cal seems content with his new life, Frida finds that without an audience, her emotions are dulled. She continues to narrate her actions in her head, as though blogging for a readership. When they receive word of a nearby settlement, she eventually convinces Cal to seek it out, but the inhabitants they find there, including Micah, who they’d thought dead, seem subtly off-kilter. While Lepucki’s story has all of the conventions of a literary dystopian novel -- stripping society of its norms, she exposes our detrimental underlying tendencies -- she does more than examine how social groups form and disintegrate. She instead turns a critical eye to interpersonal relationships. As Cal and Frida join a small, new citizenry, they begin concealing details of their daily lives from one another, and their trust takes a hit for it. Chapters are told from their alternating viewpoints as their relationship slowly ebbs. This stylistic choice would be more compelling if the story were told in the character’s voices, rather than Lepucki’s workshopped third-person narration (she’s an Iowa grad, and short, declarative sentences abound), but is nevertheless sufficient for carrying along her tense and thought-provoking plot. The kicker that sets California apart from, say, Lord of the Flies , and the many stories it's spawned, is Lepucki’s astute insight into the complex, and often conflicting, emotions women attach to childbirth today. When Frida’s pregnancy becomes known within the settlement she and Cal have joined -- a clan openly supporting “containment” -- she undulates between desiring a quiet family life and the approval of her ambitious community. This sentiment, while ostensibly specific to a post-apocalyptic society, is strangely resonant with the choices women today are faced with. Likewise with the rest of the characters’ central conflicts: should personal relationships or idealistic pursuits take precedence? With California , Lepucki raises the question, and, over the course of its gripping pages, reveals her answer. What other reviewers think: Publisher's Weekly: "As seen in chapters told from their alternating perspectives, the less they trust each other, the more tension mounts, building to an explosive climax that few readers will see coming." Kirkus: "This has the bones of an excellent book, but, sadly, an untenable amount of flab is covering them." Who wrote it? California is Edan Lepucki's first novel. She attended Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is a staff writer for The Millions. Who will read it? Fans of dystopian stories, especially those looking to graduate from Suzanne Collins and her ilk. Opening lines: "On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on a golf course. No freeways nearby, or any roads, really: those had been left to rot years before. Frida had given this place a secret name, the afterlife, and on their journey, when they were forced to hide in abandoned rest stops, or when they'd filled the car with the last of their gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind it was a township, and Cal was the mayor. She was the mayor's wife." Notable passage: "He smelled the same. She hadn't hugged him for years; even when he was alive, they barely touched, but now she couldn't let go. That smell: what was it? Pajamas worn until noon, and potato chips, and the leather band of their father's favorite watch, and the baby detergent their mother never stopped using, and his old room, the window never open, the blighted avocado tree blocking views and voyeurs alike. Her brother, his smell." Rating, out of ten: 7. Though her prose might not be particularly inventive, Lepucki's story is a compelling examination of personal relationships laid bare. A provoking thought experiment, her novel imagines a chillingly plausible future. California. And the world Cal and Frida have always known is gone. Cal and Frida have left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable despite the isolation and hardships they face. Consumed by fear of the future and mourning for a past they can't reclaim, they seek comfort and solace in one other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant. Terrified of the unknown but unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realise this community poses its own dangers. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust. A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind's dark nature and irrepressible resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Imaginative, inventive and beautifully written, California is both a shocking and engrossing read (Rosamund Lupton, bestselling author of Sister) This bestselling debut, with shades of 1984 and The Road thrusts an ordinary American couple into a frightening future. powerful and creepy . Lepucki has given expression to a generational anxiety about the near future, one rooted in the threat of environmental crisis and the loss of meaningful cultural institutions (including the printed book). The experience of reading California brings validation to anyone who sits upright in the middle of the night struck with the instability of the human project on this planet: others are awake, too. And a lot of us are reading California . ( Amity Gaige, Folio prize-shortlisted author of Schroder, Guardian ) Atwood-esque . literary and elegant in a smooth, unforced way, with that droll sense of humour and a relentlessly clear eye . very, very good ( Belfast Telegraph ) Breathtakingly original, fearless and inventive, pitch perfect in its portrayal of the intimacies and tiny betrayals of marriage, so utterly gripping it demands to be read in one sitting: Edan Lepucki's California is the novel you have been waiting for, the novel that perfectly captures the hopes and anxieties of contemporary America. This is a novel that resonates on every level, a novel that stays with you for a lifetime. Read it now (Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year) Edan Lepucki's electrifying debut novel California has everything you want from a great pool-side read. Gripping and provocative . You won't be able to put it down ( Irish Tatler ) In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities (Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad) An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal, honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped me as much as any fictional denouement I've encountered in recent years .

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