Thirst

April 25, 2016
Warner's debut novel is the story of a young married couple, Eddie and Laura Chapman, and their fight for survival after a mysterious power outage and the sudden, inexplicable absence of drinkable water. Eddie is caught in traffic when the disaster strikes; he decides to abandon his car and run the rest of the distance home. He encounters an unexpectedly dry streambed along the way, the first sign that something has gone terribly wrong, and when he finally makes it home, the full extent of the dire situation becomes clear. He's reunited with Laura and a few other neighbors who decide to wait for help instead of heading into the city. They all slowly succumb to a desperate thirst that threatens to unravel them both mentally and physically. The fight for water becomes increasingly desperate, and neighbors battle over resources with disastrous consequences. With a tight focus and a steadily increasing tension, the novel explores the limits of what we would give up of our humanity in order to survive. Warner achieves a chillingly claustrophobic atmosphere in which everything in the outside world becomes a threat. But in a market overflowing with post-apocalyptic stories, the novel never achieves the originality that it promises at the beginning, and the specific cause of the disaster remains frustratingly oblique.

March 1, 2016
In contemporary speculative fiction, story lines featuring rampant zombies and other improbable, postapocalyptic horrors alternate with subtler scenarios. First-time novelist Warner takes the latter approach in a blend of ecofiction and science fiction as he portrays an East Coast couple devastated by the abrupt and unexplained disappearance of water. After an endless expressway traffic jam forces him to abandon his car and hoof it back to his suburban home, Ed Gardner begins noticing some odd environmental anomalies on his walk. Rivers and ponds that were filled with water just days ago are now dry with ash and surrounded by lifeless trees. When Ed finally reconnects with his wife, Laura, the two quickly find themselves confronting meager water rations, a baffling absence of emergency services, and a neighborhood descending into social chaos, with dehydration swiftly testing their sanity and civility. Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Warner's spare, chilling tale paints an unsettlingly realistic picture of society on the brink and the grim choices ordinary people might have to make when faced with the urgent need to survive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)