The Strange - Nathan Ballingrud

A Locus Award Finalist 1931, New Galveston, Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas MundtÂ’s gang who have stolen her motherÂ’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance.Since AnabelleÂ’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic fatherÂ’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked. At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray BradburyÂ’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, BallingrudÂ’s novel is haunting in its evocation of AnabelleÂ’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars. Nathan BallingrudÂ’s stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and the Hulu series Monsterland, The Strange is his first novel.