Cover

Back Cover Text

In an endless winter, she carries seeds of hope

Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty—her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she’s been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented extreme winter.

With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. After a harrowing encounter with a violent cult, Wylodine and her small group of exiles become a target for its volatile leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow.

With the gripping suspense of The Road and the lyricism of Station Eleven, Stine’s vision is of a changing world where an unexpected hero searches for a place hope might take root.

Praise

Praise for Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine

“A closely observed, evocative portrayal of place in a time of extreme duress. A warning about who we become and who we want to be in an uncertain future. Beautifully written and essential.”

—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation

“Stark, dark and strangely urgent, this is a book that grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go. Alison Stine is a master at the craft. She takes us on a wild ride inside a future that feels all too real, with characters we care about, and a story that we start wishing will never end.”

—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Butterfly Girl

“Like The Road infused with feminist grit, Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter focuses on the true seeds of hope during a climate apocalypse: the things that nurture both our bodies and our souls. A startling and intimate look at what happens when our planet turns against us.”

—Mike Chen, author of A Beginning at the End

Dedication

For Henry

1

I used to have dreams that Lobo would be arrested. The sheriff and his deputies would roll up the drive, bouncing on the gravel, but coming fast, too fast to be stopped, too fast for Lobo to get away through the fields. Or maybe Lobo would be asleep, and they would surprise him, his eyes red, slit like taillights. My mama and I would weep with joy as they led him off. The deputies would wrap us in blankets, swept in their blue lights. We were innocent, weren’t we? Just at the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time, involved with the wrong man—and we didn’t know, my mama didn’t know, the extent.

But that wasn’t true, not even close.