Decades after the collapse of civilization due to the effects of climate change, Jay and Birch are young residents of a utopian community based in what remains of a small city in Northern Ontario. Jay is sent on his first mission down Highway 11 to collect useful artefacts. Along the way, he meets Elm, a town elder who has stayed on the road for most of her life. Together they brave many natural dangers, but the greatest threat of all remains: other humans.

Birch is more restless than the scholarly Jay and wants to see the world too. She leaves their community in his wake on an adventure of her own to find him but encounters perils that could take her life.
Birch and Jay will reunite in a place where they confront a terrible reminder of humanity's perennial flaw: repeating the tragic mistakes of the past.

Allister Thompson spent his youth dividing his time between working as an editor for Toronto-based publishers and touring with a rock band. He is also the author of an alternate history sci-fi novel, The Music of the Spheres. He currently runs his own freelance editorial business out of his home in North Bay.

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Thompson's novel offers a compelling salutary tale of a future which we would all be much better avoiding. In this future Ontario, a fraught landscape sets the scene for an entertaining tale where teenage angst, wanderlust, and desire play out in a plausibly violent dystopic future. The kind of future that is coming if we, the current inhabitants of Ontario, and much of the rest of the modern world, don't change our hyper-consumptive ways and start taking the future seriously.

-Simon Dalby, Professor Emeritus, Wilfrid Laurier University, author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World