The World Made By Hand Novels

For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Following a cascading set of catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemics—they are doing whatever they can to get by. The outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. The townspeople’s challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields, and rivers—no longer polluted—replenished with fish.

The electricity has flickered out. The automobile age is over. In Union Grove, a little town in upstate New York, the future is nothing like people thought it would be. Life is hard and close to the bone. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure.

In the sequel to his best-selling World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven.

In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, the electricity has flickered off, the internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. Travel may be horse-drawn and farming back at the center of life, but Union Grove is no pastoral haven. Wars are fought over dwindling resources and illness is a constant presence. Bandits roam the countryside, preying on the weak and a sinister cult threatens to shatter the town’s fragile stability.