A Farm at the End of the World: Up Next

The second book has begun. Here's a little taste of what's next.

A small garden buried under snow. A seed bank under siege. An indoor farm in an inhospitable future. Three women struggle to protect what they love and foster growth in times intent on destroying precious things.

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Summary

Nome, 1925 | Effie, reunited with her young daughter Amelia after ten years, moves to Alaska so Amelia can never be taken from her again. The pair struggle to connect as Amelia mourns the death of her adopted mother, and Effie works tirelessly as a midwife and nurse in the small town hospital. When diphtheria breaks out in the dead of winter, Amelia falls ill, and antitoxin is hundreds of miles away. Quarantined in their apartment, Effie strives to keep everything alive—even the lies she told her daughter.

Leningrad, 1941 | Katya, a botanist in a crumbling marriage, is holed up in Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, a seed bank in the besieged city. Bombs, starving citizens, and the scientists' own temptations threaten the collection and Katya's life's work. The remnants of her marriage are threatened by her feelings for fellow scientist Evgeny with whom she works to save the seeds for a future they may never see.

Council, 2136 | Voda, a Russian refugee, arrives pregnant on the shores of once inland Alaska in a world turned upside down by climate change. She finds migrant work at an indoor farm where she hides her pregnancy to keep her job. An American guard, Ray, discovers her secret and helps her keep it, hoping to foster new life at a farm at the end of the world.

Excerpt

St. Louis, Missouri | May 1923

Her mother is a husk. Life seeps from her pores, her open, rasping mouth, and the corners of her eyes into the close, hot room. Amelia daubs her lips with the washcloth, trying to replace what has been lost and seal in life for a few more minutes before she must do it again. The bedframe creaks with the young girl’s movement as she replaces the cloth in the basin. Her mother’s lipstick stands gold and erect on the nightstand like a soldier at attention, waiting to be called to service again. Etched in cursive on its sheening sides is its owner’s name: Mary. Amelia always marveled at how her mother would apply the creamy crimson, deftly pushing up the peaks of her lips so unlike Amelia’s as thin as two blades of grass. She wants to move it, to put it away along with the memory. How horrible it would be now to smear red over those crags of dry skin growing more rugged by the hour as her mother shrivels out of life.

A light breeze flutters the curtains, but it is not enough to disrupt the thick St. Louis summer which has settled in the room. Cottonwood drifts by the open window, swimming in the humidity like fish in a current. Though free from schoolwork, Amelia hates the summers, hates the inescapable, pressing heat that clings her clothes and frizzes her hair, and hates more that it has arrived in May as unexpectedly as her mother’s illness. Rivulets of sweat run down her face and neck, the icebox calling to her downstairs. Her greatest relief is to go to the icebox, run her hands and forearms over the frosted block, and hug her cheek against it. But she dares not leave her mother’s bedside. Not now. Breath crackles, catches, then slips down her mother’s throat. Each breath surprises Amelia in its strangeness, a horrible symphony of percussive phlegm, moans, whinnies, whistles, and winds. Bits of flesh like a wet napkin torn to shreds flutter at the threshold of her mother’s mouth. But there—what was that? A word? “What is it, Mama? Can I get you something?”

Mary’s eyes have come alive, alight in the ashen skin competing for dullness with the bedclothes, her nightgown, and the small-patterned wallpaper. They have a flash of gold, and Amelia glances at the tube of lipstick to see if that is the source of such a color. Her mother’s eyes are a deep brown, engulfing all light in their dark pools. Amelia has coveted those eyes, their warm glances as well as their sharp stares so adept at dismissing an eager sales girl, a solicitor clunking his Electrolux up her front steps, even her own father. But here they are, dancing with amber as her mother tries to make words grow from the dry ground of her throat.

“Do you …” Mary says, her voice like how she made witches sound in stories—a hag in the woods, a crone offering an apple.

Amelia refills the glass of water from the pitcher. She slides her slender arm under her mother’s pillow to lift her gently, as she has done countless times in the last three weeks, as her father has never done, as he has hardly come in the room at all.

Mary takes the smallest of sips. The water is trying to make her live when all she wants is to leave the water for the living, for Amelia. She must tell her before it is too late, but to say it is like putting the girl’s hand in a bowl of broken glass, asking her to fish out the truth at the bottom. “Do you remember The Farm at the End of the World?”

Nonsense is nothing new. While her mother’s breath still surprises Amelia, the random words she speaks do not. Any time her mother manages to talk, Amelia braces herself to be told that there is a long-dead relative sitting on the chest of drawers, or that something must be done about all the goldfish flopping on the hardwood. By bracing, she is able to bestow upon her mother a calm that most 12-year-olds cannot or will not give. So she considers if this is a real farm, which seems unlikely, as her mother has been a city girl her whole life and raised Amelia to be as well, paying their two pennies at the movie house more regularly than their tithes at church. It must be some creation of a dying mind, flickers turned to stories like the black and white shapes on the projector screen. Amelia sets her thin lips in a sweet smile, giving her mother another moment of peace. “No Mama, I don’t. Is that somewhere you’ve been?”

“No,” says Mary. “It’s where you were born.”

Amelia tries to connect the two sides of this answer, but they keep repelling like the same poles of two magnets, north from north, south from south, both things of the same truth but impossible to bring together. How could she be born where her mother has never been?

Mary sees the girl calculating, flipping the meaning over in her mind. The thin mouth opens, then closes, unpacks a thought only to put it back away. Tears rise in Amelia’s gray eyes, a hue like seaglass that changes with the color of her dress, that people always asked where they came from and her red hair too, the eyes that Mary never had an answer for and neither did her husband. “I’m not your mother,” she says.