Last exit

There used to be five. Now there's one: Zelda, in her beat-up car, sealing the cracks in the world where the rot is trying to simmer through. Three others have left the road, and the fifth has been lost since the day they tried to lock away the hungry darkness sneaking through the world's cracks. Now Sal--what's left of her, a dark eldritch horror--is back, calling, and Zelda has to get the gang back together, with Sal's cousin June hitching along for the ride. They have to seal off the darkness before it destroys our world. And they will--if they can--because they all owe it to each other. Gladstone's thick, brilliant novel is atmospheric, painting tremors around the dark shapes in the corners of our eyes and exploring the concept of constant surveillance and the dangers of seeking rigid control. Last Exit is thoughtful, action-packed, terrifying, and hopeful all at once, and has true, complicated friendships, found family, and queer love at its core. It's an epic story with a complex, believable cast that asks the reader what it would truly take to find a world that's better than our own.

College students discover they can manipulate the inherent uncertainties of reality to step into alternate universes in the brilliant latest from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gladstone (This Is How You Lose the Time War, written with Amal El-Mohtar). Heroine Zelda and her friends use this "knack" to search for a better world, one "where history turned out different." Instead, they find the rot, a hungry evil that devours every world it touches--and, in a terrible miscalculation, Zelda's lover, Sal, is lost to the rot. Ten years later, Zelda's on the road, alone, and working to stamp out the rot wherever it creeps into her world. When Sal's 17-year-old cousin, June, demands answers about what really happened to Sal, Zelda takes June into an "alt"--and discovers that Sal, or whatever she's become, is coming home. Now Zelda must bring her old friends back together to travel to the Crossroads, where worlds meet, in hopes of sealing off the rot forever. Gladstone weaves magic and mathematics in vivid and poetic prose. There's a wonderful diversity of characters and relationships, with deep insight on how the characters' differing traumas and marginalizations influence what they want out of the alternate worlds. The result blends fantasy, horror, and science fiction to produce a stunning, insightful novel that wants a better world just as much as its protagonists do. (Feb.)