A New York Times Book of the Year - Nebula Award nominee - Featuring an introduction by Gloria SteinemFrom the pioneering New York Times bestselling science fiction author of Kindred.The radically speculative odyssey of a young Black woman in a post-apocalyptic America and the community she cultivates despite the horrors of climate change and social inequalityThe time is 2025. The place is California, where small, walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18-year-old Black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy"--which causes her to feel others' pain as her own--sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.