The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel » (Unabridged)

James Howard Kunstler is the author of eight novels. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and an editor for Rolling Stone, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He lives in upstate New York.

Already a renowned social commentator and a best-selling novelist and nonfiction writer, James Howard Kunstler has recently attained even greater prominence in the global conversation about energy and the environment. In the sequel to his novel, World Made by Hand, Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven. Wars are fought over dwindling resources and illness is a constant presence. Bandits roam the countryside, preying on the weak. And a sinister cult threatens to shatter Union Grove’s fragile stability.

In a book that is both shocking yet eerily convincing, Kunstler seamlessly weaves hot-button issues such as the decline of oil and the perils of climate change into a compelling narrative of violence, religious hysteria, innocence lost, and love found.

Publishers Weekly

In the sequel to his bestselling World Made by Hand, Kunstler delivers another grim and suspenseful novel set in a post-oil world without electricity, Internet, or national order. In Union Grove, N.Y., the locals and the New Faithers, a religious order that has moved into an abandoned school, co-exist in an uneasy peace. Jasper Copeland, the teenage son of the town doctor, runs away from Union Grove after he takes revenge on a New Faither's horse that killed his dog, wandering the darkened countryside until he meets a bandit named Billy Bones, who drags him along on a vicious rampage. Meanwhile, back in Union Grove, Jasper's father and friends try to discover what happened to Jasper, while the New Faithers, led by the enigmatic Brother Jobe, learn of the boy's involvement in the horse's death and also want to find him. Kunstler's postapocalyptic world is neither a merciless nightmare nor a starry-eyed return to some pastoral faux utopia; it's a hard existence dotted with adventure, revenge, mysticism, and those same human emotions that existed before the power went out. (Sept.)