Trials

At four in the morning, the world's sleepers begin to vanish. Rowan Cole is awake when it happens — a construction electrician running out the clock on a life he stopped living the day his fiancée died. When he finally sleeps, he wakes somewhere else: an evergreen wilderness with no way out, a stranger named Rayssa, and a book on a stone podium bearing a single rule. You must survive, not live. They have one year. Two knives, an axe, and the skills between them. And from the mountain that rises over their small, walled country comes a sound, night after night — not the wind, not an animal — a voice they will spend the whole year trying not to name. To live through the winter, they will have to build a life by hand. To live through what waits at the end of it, they will each have to say the one thing they have never told anyone. For readers of The Road, Station Eleven, and Cold Mountain — the first book in a speculative literary saga about survival, grief, and the cost of getting back the one thing you would trade everything for.