Vowing to meet eleven years after sealing letters they wrote to each other in an old metal box, best friends Ellie and Nolan both have reservations about seeing each other again as loneliness, personal tragedies, and a lack of faith haunt both of them.

"Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily...

"The 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...