Ashfall

Ten years ago, a supervolcano buried Europe under grey ash. The sun is a pale coin behind the cloud, the rain burns, and nothing has grown since. Dr Ruth Calder was a volcanologist. She spent her career warning that this would happen, and she has spent ten years keeping 112 survivors alive in a Baltic shipyard. Now the grain is rotting and winter is coming. Then a radio signal reaches them, repeating in four languages: Come south. The valley is green. Bring seeds. Ruth knows a green valley under that sky is impossible. She also knows where the signal is coming from, and she tells no one. Fourteen patched vehicles. Nineteen children. Twenty-four thousand litres of diesel and nineteen hundred kilometres of dead road. Ahead lie ash storms, a broken bridge over the Elbe, scavengers who coat themselves in lime, and the Tollmen who hold the Alps and want half of everything. Behind Ruth, a preacher is turning hope into a faith that cannot be questioned. Beside her, a ten-year-old girl who has never seen a blue sky is drawing one, one pencil stroke at a time. The valley is real. So is what is keeping it green. ASHFALL is a post-apocalyptic survival novel about leadership, guilt, and what it costs to tell people the truth when a lie is the only thing keeping them walking.