Ruth at the End of the Earth

If you thought that what Paul Muad’Dib needed was a provident Mormon family’s food storage, have I got a thrilling adventure tale for you. A cold-eyed and terrifying vision of a future southwest, Ruth at the End of the Earth is Dune on a human scale, Mad Max with Mormons in the red rock country. Stripped of all pretense and civilization, bound and driven by their own ancestors, a man and a woman fight the world and each other to survive the burning desert at theend of time.—DJ Butler — author of Witchy Eye and Abbott in DarknessBennion’s book is an accessible and inspiring reflection on the small–and broad-scale implications of technology. We as readers are challenged in this gripping climate narrative to see how others weigh the trade-offs that have already been made and will yet be made as we work to sustain ourselves and our neighbors on this finite world. The story of Ruth provides a way of thinking about our future that is both cautionary and personal.—Richard Gill — global change ecologistSo thoroughly has Bennion imagined this terrifying future that I found myself caught up in its claustrophobic world. I felt that I shouldn’t go outside in the sunlight. I found the romance of a moonlit night supplanted by the need to hunt food in the dark. I felt the full force of Ruth’s terror at being in this version of Salt Lake City. I felt the pain of the journey that Ruth must undertake to save her family. And I shared her ambivalence at the end, about what she must decide to do. All thisleaves me terrified at what we have done to our Earth.—Dennis Clark — poet and general nuisance