Join the Des Moines Public Library and Beaverdale Books for a special evening with Stephen Markley, the best-selling author of Ohio.    His new book, The Deluge (on sale January 10), has been called “a modern classic” and “prophetic, terrifying, uplifting” by legendary author Stephen King.

Markley will discuss his work with author Sean Adams, whose new novel, The Thing in the Snow, will be on sale January 3. Both authors are graduates of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  The program is free and open to the public.

The Deluge — a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.  

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

About the Moderator

Sean Adams  is a graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the critically acclaimed author of The Heap.  His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Normal School, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Emma, and their various pets.