The Westward Hours
A dystopian epic of survival and memory in a climate-ravaged America
Long after climate change has wiped out millions and reshaped the world, the US has ended in civil war and rule by corporations. A privileged class of oligarchs and their private security units live under climate-controlled domes, while the dispossessed majority struggles to survive.
In the wastelands of Sacrifice, once the American Southwest, a charismatic brother and sister known in whispers as “The Twins” gather an army of the desperate and launch a brief, terrifying insurgency. Decades later, the Reunited States rises again, colder, harder, more religious and more exclusionary than ever.
But the blazing legacy of the Twins, half history and half legend, lingers in surprising ways.
Equal parts futuristic western and literary epic, Dennison Smith’s novel confronts what is lost and what may yet be born.