The Ungoverned

"It's at once a deeply absorbing story of humans pushed to their limits and a study of the ways in which those humans behave when left to themselves in an environment with no governing authority... A thematically rich tale of survival buttressed by a keen grasp of psychology." -Kirkus Reviews What would you do if the structures that hold society together vanished? Not weakened. Not fractured. Gone. George, a burned-out public defender trying to reinvent himself as a professor, gets his answer when a decrepit cruise ship carrying a floating college campus sinks in the South Pacific. He washes ashore on an uninhabited island with a handful of survivors and no law but the kind you enforce yourself. Cooperation curdles fast. A poetry professor seizes control by sheer will. Fraternity brothers on the next island turn predatory. And George, the man who once made his living defending murderers, begins to suspect that the most dangerous person on the island might be himself. Raw and unsparing, THE UNGOVERNED drags an ancient question out of the philosophy classroom and into the jungle, then answers it with sex, blood, and a homemade hatchet.