Omar El Akkad is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of a National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle – a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.