Find out the latest indie author news. For FREE.

ADVERTISEMENT

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 05/2019
  • 978-0-9984657-6-0 B07P968HQD
  • 260 pages
  • $6.99
Paperback Details
  • 05/2019
  • 978-0-9984657-5-3 B07P968HQD
  • 260 pages
  • $12.95
Kirk Kjeldsen
Author
East

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

Fourteen-year-old Job Hammon ekes out an itinerant existence in the Pacific Northwest, in a not-too-distant future where China and other industrial economies have become primary world powers, and the United States has become a fractured, post-industrial wasteland. When Job learns that the mother he’d thought had died years before had actually left to seek work in Asia, he emigrates there in hopes of finding her and finding a better life for himself. Set to a backdrop of such issues as immigration, industrialization, and climate displacement, East offers a harrowing and all-too-possible glimpse at a post-American diaspora struggling to find a new place in the world.
Reviews
Foreword Reviews

East 
Kirk Kjeldsen 
Grenzland Press (May 28, 2019) 
Softcover $12.95 
(260pp) 
978-0-9984657-5-3

Job was born just in time to watch the promise of the former United States fade definitively away. Kirk Kjeldsen’s darkly realistic postapocalyptic novel East begins in the small Oregon town where Job grew up—where the mines lie abandoned and everyone’s next meal is dependent on their ability to hunt, scavenge, or trade. Job is only a teenager, but he’s already seen struggling towns blink dead as the air chokes out opportunities, wildlife, and his loved ones. After his brother Eli dies—having just revealed that their mother might still be alive in China—Job decides to set out for less polluted shores. Getting across the ocean means submitting himself to traffickers, though, and he finds himself in an unwelcoming land where immigrants live “invisible lives, and they [die] invisible deaths.” Job’s journey to China may be driven by the hope of a reunion with his mother, but hope is something that the novel always handles with suspicion. Climate change and collapsed governments make Job’s a world in which brutality is assured and death is always close at hand. Even that final escape isn’t considered with much relief: Job projects that the “infinite void … might actually be dark and empty and of this world.” If hope is not the point of the novel, its unflinching consideration of what might be ahead for human beings is. It amplifies current concerns and portends a future in which reversing course may be impossible. Job himself becomes one name in a grander human drama as he continent-hops toward the end of the world. Around him, others clutch tight to their increasingly irrelevant and disappearing luxuries, but tides keep rising, and there’s no real hope of salvation. Colored by violence and desperation, East’s cli-fi futurescape is both sobering and gripping. MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (May/June 2019)

 

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

Jersey's Best / The New Jersey Star-Ledger

The publisher’s synopsis of Kirk Kjeldsen’s new novel “East” (Grenzland Press, 260 pp., $12.95 paperback) establishes the time frame: “in the not too distant future.”

How far into the future isn’t specified, but it’s immediately clear that America has failed in every conceivable way. Natural resources have been squandered, the economy has collapsed, air and water are irreversibly polluted and industry is a thing of the past. The few thriving cities that remain are walled and guarded. There are no jobs for most, and people in remote areas live hand to mouth, killing squirrels, frogs and even rats for sustenance. Desperation leads to depravity, and no one can be trusted.

In this iteration of the world, the dominant powers are China, Russia and Africa.

The story begins in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, where oil and gas extraction has ruined the land, poverty prevails and climate change has irrevocably altered everything. Water is undrinkable unless boiled, the air is so thickly polluted it obscures the sun, and the once-pristine landscape, long since fracked to a fare-thee-well, is littered with trash and the skeletal remains of dead wildlife.

The protagonist of this grim, dystopian tale is Job Hammon, a 14-year-old boy whose elder brother, Eli, has succumbed to cancer. Before he died, Eli told him that their mother, whom Job has always believed died, actually left the boys with their grandfather and went to China when Job was a small child.

Having now lost the last familial tie to his impoverished village, Job resolves to go to China to find her. Packing up his only possessions of worth – a gold wedding band, a little money, a cheap necklace and a penny knife – he makes his way to Oakland, Calif., on the advice of a village woman. He manages to locate Sister Vy, the contact he was told could get him onto a trans-Pacific freight ship.

She takes the ring, but makes it clear he will have to do a lot of hard work to pay back the full cost of his passage.

The crossing is rigorous, but Job’s resilience at 14 and his familiarity with hardship serve him well. He is assigned the lowliest jobs on the ship – washing dishes and pots and cleaning out slop buckets of human waste. But after enduring weeks of this physical work, he starts getting stronger. He will need that strength for the demanding factory work that lies ahead.

Kjeldsen has painted a stirring portrait of a boy on the cusp of manhood who, against unimaginable odds and setbacks, draws on his growing physical strength and experience to eke out a living. He is consigned to work off his remaining passage debt as a factory prisoner, where beatings for perceived insufficient productivity are routine.

Convinced he will never be sprung, Job eventually breaks out and finds work in one filthy factory after another, where he is subjected to chemicals that make him ill and ruthless bosses only concerned with maximum productivity. But he also reconnects with a young woman who was kind to him during his passage, and now she needs his help.

He also pursues the search for his mother, which involves an altogether different kind of danger. The reader never escapes a sense of imminent peril.

“East,” Kjeldsen’s fourth novel, further underscores the author’s talent for creating spare, gripping, original, page-turning plots. While each novel is unrelated to the others, common threads prevail – a keen understanding of the human spirit, a penchant for palpable, pictorial description and storytelling mastery.

The story is fantastic, certainly. But it clearly emanates from the anxieties that characterize today’s America – so much so that it feels eerily, chillingly prescient.

Fran Wood, retired Star-Ledger op-ed columnist and former books editor, blogs at jerseysbest.com.

Kirkus Reviews

KIRKUS REVIEW

A teenager from Oregon becomes an illegal immigrant in China.

In this near-future novel, Kjeldsen (The Depths, 2018) takes readers into a world where the United States has dissolved into a collection of failed states, and China is the destination for those with hopes for jobs and stability. Fourteen-year-old Job and his older brother, Eli, fend for themselves in an Oregon village. Before Eli dies of an untreated illness, he tells Job that their mother is not dead but left to work in a Chinese factory a decade earlier. With nothing to keep him in Oregon, Job decides to make his way to China, paying a smuggler and working for his keep on a decrepit cargo ship filled with refugees, including Ynez, whom he develops a crush on. After the harrowing journey, Job is held prisoner in a Chinese factory, where he must work off his debt to the smugglers. When it becomes clear the bosses will never let him go, Job and another worker manage to escape, and he sets off in search of his mother. The hunt is unsuccessful for months, although he does manage to achieve some financial stability as a bike messenger and to save Ynez, whose own refugee experience has been one of despair. Job ultimately tracks down his mother, but she is unwelcoming, although she does help after he is beaten and imprisoned. Despite the unanswered questions about his family, Job decides to let the past go and focus on his future with Ynez as they strive to look after themselves in an unwelcoming land.

Kjeldsen does an excellent job of building Job’s damaged world, drawing vivid scenes: “Big, smoke-belching buses, gleaming town cars, and scores of taxis and motorcycles choked the busy avenues and boulevards, and drones rose and fell and rose again like horses on an amusement park carousel.” The book’s biblical themes are evident from the start; one of Job’s few possessions is “what was left of the family Bible, which his grandfather had used to teach him and Eli to read with and which only included the latter portions of the Old Testament from Ezra to Malachi and the first four books of the New Testament.” The parallels to present-day illegal immigration, human trafficking, and refugee crises are also hard to miss, with the story’s American characters experiencing the conditions that people in other countries currently face, though the text does not address these connections directly. While the writing is generally strong, there are some awkward moments, including Job’s descriptions of characters’ races (“Filipino or some other mixture of Latino and Asian”; “Asian Caucasian children”) and the frequency with which beaten-up characters are “sucking for air.” But the fast-paced plot will keep readers turning pages. And while the resolution of Job’s quest for his mother leaves the audience with few concrete answers, the novel’s ending is satisfying, showing persistence and hope for the future without an optimism that would be out of place in the narrative.

A generally strong tale of a bleak future seen through the eyes of one determined individual.

Pub Date: May 28th, 2019
Page count: 166pp
Publisher: Grenzland Press
Program: Kirkus Indie

Richmond Times-Dispatch / The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg

Book review: The balance has shifted in dystopian thriller 'East'

By JAY STRAFFORD FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

In the not-distant future, a new world order prevails.

The United States, victimized by trade wars, environmental destruction and broken politics, has divided into a collection of well-off free states and city-states—and impoverished wastelands where makeshift militias roam.

But China and other industrialized nations thrive.

In Oregon, 14-year-old Job Hammon and his cancer-ravaged older brother, Eli, eke out a minimal existence in their stricken village. But when Eli feels death approaching, he shares a secret with Job: Their mother did not die, but departed for China when Job was 4.

So begins “East,” Kirk Kjeldsen’s fourth novel.

With no family and little hope, Job chooses to travel to China to search for his mother and a better life. He takes a train to California, boards a tramp steamer and sets off with hundreds of other travelers on what’s simultaneously a voyage of the damned and a journey of aspiration.

Upon reaching China and having agreed to indentured servitude, he’s assigned to a prison-like shoe factory but escapes and sets out for the city that Eli said was their mother’s destination. But he moves on when told she had left seven years ago.

Months pass as Job shifts from factory to factory, always hoping to be given his pay. Along the way and after he becomes a courier, he reunites by chance with Ynez, a beautiful young Hispanic woman he had encountered aboard the steamer on the way to meet her fiancé. But changed circumstances have damaged her.

Kjeldsen, an assistant professor in the cinema program of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, lived in China for four years and uses that experience to enrich his story. With spare but muscular prose, a fully realized protagonist and an unblinking eye, he provides a plausible picture of a frightening future.

Dystopian and disturbing, “East” concentrates the mind as well as the heart as it portrays a world in which the balance has shifted. A tale devoid of comfort but bristling with warning, it reaffirms Kjeldsen’s stature as a crackerjack practitioner of the literary thriller.

Jay Strafford, a retired Virginia journalist, now lives in Florida.

 

News
11/09/2018
East Longlisted for the Dzanc Prize for Fiction

DZANC CONTEST LONGLISTS ANNOUNCED

November 9, 2018

After weeks of intense reading, we're ready to release the longlists for the 2018 Dzanc prizes.

Narrowing down hundreds of talented submissions to this handful of longlisters was excruciating. We are grateful to all of the authors who trusted us with your work and gave us a chance to consider your hard-won manuscripts. We're sorry we can only honor a few of you.

 

Longlist for the Dzanc Prize for Fiction:

DEAR RUNAWAY by Peter Derk
THE CREMATION PROJECT by Andrea Mason
THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD by Alex Wilson
BLOOMLAND by John Englehardt
THE DEER by Dash Elhauge
EX-MEMBERS by Tobias Carroll
MIA by Kayla Eason
DELLA IN LOVELAND by Linda Heller
CONCORD by Joshua Corey
THE FIDDLER IN THE NIGHT by Christian Fennell
AS YOU WERE by David Tromblay
THE RATE AT WHICH SHE TRAVELS BACKWARDS by Kirsten Kaschock
GREAT AMERICANS by Lisa Srisuro
EVELYN & ALICE by Khristian Mecom
THE MARCIE PILLOW by Monique Daviau
NEVER BE ALONE by Kate Brody
THE STAY by Mary Kuryla
A SHORT MOVE by Katherine Hill
THE AMREEKIAD by Saher Alam
EAST by Kirk Kjeldsen
LA GLORIA by Sam Anderson-Ramos
GREEN WORLD by Greg Hrbek

 

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 05/2019
  • 978-0-9984657-6-0 B07P968HQD
  • 260 pages
  • $6.99
Paperback Details
  • 05/2019
  • 978-0-9984657-5-3 B07P968HQD
  • 260 pages
  • $12.95
ADVERTISEMENT

Loading...