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

Nome, Alaska | October 1924

When Effie arrives on the street below their apartment, the window is dark. She wonders if Amelia has chosen a different home for the evening instead. Effie kicks her mukluks on the doorframe and ascends the flight to their unit. Opening the door, dim light from the hallway edges over the shapes of the living room. Stillness, silence. She flicks on the pendant light, and there is Amelia in the wingback armchair, furs still on with no fire lit.

“Do you want to talk?” Effie asks.

Amelia wipes her hand across her cheek, and Effie realizes the girl is crying. She starts to her, but Amelia stiffens.

Amelia asks, “What was The Farm at the End of the World?”

It’s like a pendant lamp goes on in Effie’s head, this one kerosene, the flame guttering. “Who told you about that?”

Amelia sets her chin. “My mother. She said it was where I was born.”

The small confusion dissipates the tension between Effie’s shoulder blades. “Oh no,” she says. “You were born in the city.”

Amelia stirs as if a spring has poked through the chair cushion. When her mother had told her she was born on a farm, when it folded into the weak memories of her early life, it remade Amelia’s image of herself. And now here is Effie remaking it again, back to some version of the original.

Effie offers her a drop more of her history. “You did live there, for a time. It’s where I was born.” She can tell the girl is not satisfied. It reminds Effie of when her little sister would ask where she was going, but really wanted to ask, could she come along?

“Where is it? With a name like that?” Amelia asks.

The name always seemed ridiculous to Effie. True, it was far from town, but they could ride there and back and still have plenty of sunlight on either end of the journey. It was farther still from the Meramec that flowed to St. Louis, to the Mississippi, and beyond and made trade in the small town possible. But it was not the end of the world. There were other farms and other towns beyond the wilderness that made the northern edge of their plot of land. It was simply as far as her grandfather could afford to travel, in dollars and in health, taken ill as he was on his journey from Kentucky with his Danish bride. Effie grew up assuming men were always like that, calling things the end when they couldn’t dream of going farther.

“It’s near St. James. Do you know that place?”

Amelia shakes her head. But St. James does not sound like the end of the world.

“Well, you did live there. For some months.”

Amelia wants Effie to go on, but the woman seals up like she does about this period of the past, holding words as tight as huskies hold a stolen mitten in their jaws.

“You know I’ll keep our secrets,” Amelia says. “But you have to tell me what they are.”