One of our finest literary voices delivers arguably his strongest novel yet. America as we know it has fragmented. Its machines have stopped, its communities splintered, its history virtually forgotten, and the great migration has started eastwards, to ships rumoured to sail to a land of greater promise. THE PESTHOUSE imagines a civilization adapting to a future without technology, without science, without social cohesion. But it is a future in which love and resolve live on, in the story of Franklin and Margaret and the path they travel together.