A Debut Novel About Individual Agency in Apocalyptic Times

When I was a proto-embryonic critic, in my painfully awkward junior high school years, my reading was wildly incongruous. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to Siddhartha to The Grapes of Wrath to cheap, used Harlequin Regency romances. 

I had weird middle of the night reveries about what I might grow up to be. Beco...