Ninety-five years ago T.S. Eliot published "The Wasteland," one of the first and bleakest visions of a shattered modern world. Nearly a century later, we're awash in fictional dystopias.

Science fiction writers tilled this stony ground for decades before the current vogue for grim variants of the Way We Live Now made bestsellers out of "The Road" and "Station Eleven" and created a vast marketing category for publishers of YA books such as "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."


But if the dystopia bubble bursts, as the horror market did in the early 1990s, we may see an entirely new wasteland emerge. ''Cli-fi'' anyone? What cli-fi dystopic novels might survive a literary apocalypse?

Laura van den Berg's cli fi novel "Find Me" has a good shot.

Van den Berg uses her gift for capturing the disturbingly elegiac qualities of 21st century life to heartbreaking effect in this, her first cli fi novel.

Set in a near-future AMERICA blighted by disastrous climate change and ....



In an interview last year, Van den Berg spoke of her desire to capture the apocalyptic mood of contemporary life in a novel.

"I really wanted to take that weather, that atmosphere, and ask: what might be the tipping point?"


Find Me
Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux