The Small Winter Sun

Five years after war plunges America into nuclear winter, sixty-two-year-old Janet Tyler lives a precarious existence on a small Northern California farm. Grieving the violent death of her husband and struggling to find meaning in a world of scarcity, propaganda, and ecological collapse, Janet survives by tending her remaining animals, guarding her land, and enduring the relentless weight of loss. When a government recruiter offers her a chance to help document the last pockets of surviving wilderness, she reluctantly steps beyond the boundaries of her isolated life. Looking for a reason to keep going, she seeks to help Ava, a widow with two young daughters. However, befriending Ava leads to a horrifying revelation that causes Janet to question her life, her purpose, and her idea of herself as someone good. Her desire to protect Ava and her daughters forces both women into an uneasy reckoning with guilt, protection, and the cost of staying alive. Literary, intimate, and quietly devastating, The Small Winter Sun is about ordinary people living after the end of ordinary life. At its heart is a story of moral injury and unexpected kinship-of women, children, land, animals, and memory gathered around the smallest possible hope: that something good can be saved.