Alan Heathcock, alum of the Boise State Creative Writing MFA Program, published his first novel, “40” with Macmillan. The novel, set in a future America ravaged by political unrest, natural disasters, and pandemic, features a heroine who “must come to terms with the consequences of her decisions––and face the challenges of building a new world,” according to the Macmillan website.
Reviews of “40”
“Shaped from foreboding, almost neo-biblical prose, ’40’ is a fast-paced vision of a shattered American future: a place of violent factions, barbaric pageantry, remote-control rain, and angels made real. Alan Heathcock has created a speculative thriller that glitters with imagination and glows with heart.”
—Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land
“With ’40,’ Alan Heathcock has come blazing into the novel form, giving us an original mythos, a tour de force of metamorphosis and survival. If an angry Flannery O’Connor wrote post-apocalyptic fiction with a pen of fire, it might look something like this.”
—Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers
“Forged amid the ashes and blood of climate catastrophe, ’40’ invokes a genre-busting Wild West where faith and war and family converge with razor-sharp prose, volleying to become a compass for an uncertain future. These words will cut deep into your soul and fill it with angelic feathers and the detritus of a dying world—often beautiful and horrific at once. You can try to corral 40 at a roundtable of Paolo Bacigalupi, Angela Carter, and Cormac McCarthy, but this near-future prophecy is chiefly Heathcockian.”
—Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
About Alan Heathcock
Alan Heathcock won a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, and a National Magazine Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts, he published a collection of short stories, “VOLT,” in 2011. Selected as a Best Book of the Year by numerous newspapers and magazines and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the New York Times named “VOLT” as an Editors’ Choice title.