“Must-read.”
City of Orange
A man who can not remember his own name wakes up in an apocalyptic landscape, injured and alone. He has vague memories of life before, but he can’t see it clearly and can’t grasp how his current situation came to be. He must learn to survive by finding sources of water and foraging for food. Then he encounters a boy–and he realizes nothing is what he thought it was, neither the past nor the present.
“Whether it’s discovering shelter, finding food or simply managing in brutal conditions, the ever-challenging backdrop of City of Orange makes the determining of reality a mystery readers will want to solve alongside the main character. That’s this novel’s biggest feat: By giving just enough vivid detail but keeping key elements ambiguous, a reader can easily morph into the main character and become a part of this world.” ★★★½ out of 4 stars
“City of Orange is a fast-paced read, and Yoon’s ability to lighten the mood keeps it from becoming as dread-inducing as some end-of-the-world novels can be. While it does have a big twist some readers will see coming, the novel works in part because obfuscation of that twist isn’t the book’s main concern. That honor belongs to the eternal question, relevant to both the apocalypse and everyday life, of how we’re supposed to go on when living seems impossible in the face of all that has been lost.”
“Very few postapocalyptic novels have the literary qualities of this one. City of Orange belongs in a very narrow category, alongside Emily St. John’s Station Eleven, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like all the best authors in the genre, David Yoon is willing to ask what ‘the End of the World’ really means — and provide the reader with a thoughtful, heartfelt answer.”
“The vividness of [Yoon’s] descriptions—of things which are so commonplace as to go generally unseen—and the alluring stream-of-consciousness thoughts of our hero—a tapestry of pop culture, philosophy, and emotional storms—provide a page-turning intensity.”
“Yoon finds the tension in the smallest of acts—like heating up a can of soup—and builds suspense by teasing out information about the world, forcing readers to question everything. Fans of The Martian will enjoy this new take on the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar land.”
“This is a book that encourages readers to think deeply about how they might handle the situation of losing their moorings in a world suddenly alien. It's an ambitious novel that takes some big risks, but they pay off dramatically in the end.”
“Yoon’s version of the apocalypse takes a much narrower focus than many in the genre, focusing on community, family, and loss through the narrator’s personal experience. The start may be a little slow going, but as the narrator begins to pick up the pieces of his memory, his own story becomes much more compelling and heartfelt than the end of the world could ever be…Out of a ruined America, an earnest and affecting character study.”
“Rather than expand fully into the potential of dystopian fiction, Yoon narrows our vision of post-apocalypse into a searing lens through which we gain new perspectives on fundamental human values of love, grief, and regret.”
Published by Penguin Putnam. My editor is the frighteningly brilliant Mark Tavani.
