Cold Chain

One night, someone turns off the refrigerators. By winter, they turn off the country.

It starts as a joke. Overnight, the coolers in eleven thousand American supermarkets are told to heat themselves, and by morning the whole country is laughing at the spoiled milk and the melted ice cream. The laughing stops when the planes won't fly. It stops for good when the lights go out, and the hardest winter in living memory comes down on a nation that has forgotten how to be cold.

In the hills of northern Michigan, Walt Holden has spent ten years getting ready for exactly this - a well, a cellar full of food, and a gate he can lock against the world. Outside Albany, in a glass house run by machines, his estranged daughter Dana has built the opposite kind of life, frictionless and bright, with an aging father-in-law who depends on insulin that has to stay cold. The two haven't truly spoken in eight years.

When the grid finally fails, both families discover what their choices were really worth, and a fifteen-year-old boy and a dying old man set out to drive six hundred miles across a darkened country toward the one gate that might still open.

Unflinching and deeply human, Cold Chain is American social realism for the age of the invisible attack - a novel about the thin, humming web we have hung our lives on, and about what is left when it goes dark.