The Wildlands

From the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award-winning author of The Lightkeepers , comes a page-turning new novel that explores the bond between siblings and the animal instincts that threaten to destroy them.

Mercy, Oklahoma became infamous when a Category Five tornado ravaged the small town. No family was more devastated than the McClouds: four siblings left orphaned, their home and farm demolished. Darlene, Jane, and Cora became the media focus of the tornado's aftermath, causing great tension with their brother, Tucker, who soon abandoned his sisters to their grief and disappeared.

On the three-year anniversary of the tornado, a cosmetics factory outside of Mercy is bombed, and the lab animals trapped within are released. This violent act appears at first to have nothing to do with "the saddest family in Mercy." Then Tucker reappears, injured from the blast, and seeks the help of nine-year-old Cora. Caught up in the thrall of her brilliant, charismatic brother, whom she has desperately missed, Cora agrees to accompany Tucker on his cross-country mission to save animals and make war on human civilization.

Cora becomes her brother’s unwitting accomplice, taking on a new identity while engaging in acts of escalating violence. Darlene works with Mercy police to find her siblings, leading to an unexpected showdown at a zoo in Southern California, as Tucker erases the boundaries between the human and animal world. The Wildlands is another remarkable literary thriller from critically acclaimed writer Abby Geni, one that examines what happens when one family becomes trapped in the tenuous space between wild and tame, human and animal.