After a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide, the United States has grown increasingly anarchic. Large numbers of children are stranded in orphanages, and systems we take for granted are fraying at the seams. When orphaned Cole Vining finds refuge with an evangelical pastor and his young wife in a small Indiana town, he knows he is one of the lucky ones. Sheltered Salvation City has been spared much of the devastation of the outside world. But it's a starkly different community from the one Cole has known, and he struggles with what this changed world means for him. As those around him become increasingly fixated on their vision of utopia - so different from his own parents' dreams - Cole begins to imagine a new and different future for himself. Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style, Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, weaving the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on the true meaning of salvation. Things come undone with shocking rapidity when a flu pandemic ravages America. Cole, the son of liberal atheists and a smart, self-contained boy who loves to draw and counts explorer among his favorite words, narrates Nuñez’s sixth gripping novel, one of many recent literary postapocalyptic tales. Adept at matching psychological intricacy with edge-of-your-seat plots, the versatile Nuñez gracefully entwines a classic coming-of-age story with a terrifying medical catastrophe and a profound battle between secular and religious viewpoints. The pandemic orphans and nearly kills Cole, who ends up living with a kindhearted Evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a community preparing for the Rapture. It’s all bible studies, guns, rapture children, and saved adults, including fiercely tattooed, one-eyed Mason. As Cole emerges from a thicket of grief and the confusion of sexual awakening and recognizes and trusts his hunger for education and the larger world, however damaged and dangerous, Nuñez brilliantly contrasts epic social failure and tragedy with the unfurling of one promising life, reminding us that even in the worst of times, we seek coherence, discovery, and connection. --Donna Seaman Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels The Last of Her Kind , A Feather on the Breath of God , and For Rouenna , among others. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City. Part One The best way to remember people after they've passed is to remember the good about them. The first time Cole hears Pastor Wyatt say this he remembers how his mother hated when people said passed, or passed away. He'd come home from school one day and repeated the teacher's announcement: Ruthie Lind was absent that day because her grandmother had passed. "Died. Say died, pumpkin," his mother said. "Passed sounds so silly." She had called him pumpkin and she did not seem to be angry with him, but he had felt obscurely ashamed. Later he was told that people were afraid to say died because they were afraid of dying. Passed was just a euphemism. The funny-sounding word was new to Cole and for a time it kept recurring, floating into his head for no apparent reason. But the first time he saw the word in a book he did not recognize it, he was so sure it began with a u . Followed by an f , of course. Pastor Wyatt does not always say passed. More often he says went home. ("Had a great-aunt went home at a hundred and three.") It all depends on whether the person he is talking about was saved or unsaved. When he is preaching, Pastor Wyatt never says passed. Pastor Wyatt is not afraid of dying. "That's my job in a nutshell. I've got to teach people not to be afraid. We're all going to die, that's for certain. And the thing for folks to do is stop wasting their energy being all headless and fearful like a herd of spooked cattle." At first, whenever Pastor Wyatt spoke directly to him, Cole would watch Pastor Wyatt's hands. He was not yet comfortable looking Pastor Wyatt in the face. Cole was keeping so much in—he had so many secrets—he did not like to look anyone in the face if he could help it. He knew this gave the impression he'd done something wrong, and that is just how he felt: as if he'd done something wrong and was trying to hide it. He still feels this way much of the time. He thinks he will always feel this way. Pastor Wyatt himself has a way of looking at people that Cole would call staring. His mother would have called it fucking rude. But from what he can tell, other people are not at all disturbed by the way Pastor Wyatt looks—or stares—at them. Cole understands that Pastor Wyatt is thought to be handsome, though Cole himself has no opinion about this. But he has observed that people are delighted to have Pastor Wyatt's attention on them, especially if they are women. Pastor Wyatt always looks right i