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VIKING, SUMMER 2022

Walk the Vanished Earth

It is 1873, and Samson butchers bison on the Kansas plains, hungering for a family and farm of his own. It is 1975, and twelve-year-old Bea walks north from New Mexico, bearing a baby she believes will be a giant. It is 2027, and Kaiser scavenges for supplies in flooded New Orleans, mourning what she lost to the water. It is 2073, and young Moon traverses the surface of Mars, questioning why she has only known the tall white Uncles with whom she travels. Spanning two hundred years, seven generations, and two planets, WALK THE VANISHED EARTH follows one American family through psychological devastation and environmental collapse, as they seek to realize their oversized dreams and make their world anew.

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Praise for Walk the Vanished Earth

“Erin Swan's debut novel enthralled me from the first page. Walk the Vanished Earth is weird, wonderful and beautifully written; I never knew what would happen next, but was deeply satisfied by each turn of the story. A floating city! Seven generations of a single family line! Life on Mars! I highly recommend this novel.” —Ann Napolitano, bestselling author of Dear Edward

“Walk the Vanished Earth is a beautiful achievement. A story of mothers and daughters, climate collapse, improbable love, space travel, disaster and redemption, destiny and choice – it’s nearly impossible to describe all the notes Erin Swan hits in this astonishing debut. Swan writes in spare, elegant prose that conjures an 1880s Kansas prairie just as vividly as a futuristic colony on Mars. Both timely and timeless, this novel will stay with me for a long time to come.” —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics

"The quintessential multigenerational family epic for the 21st century, a story at once singular and speculative and yet also universal and immediate. Swan offers a gorgeously rendered parable about how blood ties destroy us--and at the same time how they help us excavate hope from hopelessness, purpose from ruin." —Juliet Grames, author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Walk the Vanished Earth is a dazzling novel of the future and the past. In the very best way, I never knew where Erin Swan would take me next but I always wanted to follow her, whether it was to a Piggly Wiggly in Kansas City or to a floating city among the rooftops or a garden on Mars. Her characters are passionate and unforgettable and her prose is dazzling. A stunning debut.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field

"Walk the Vanished Earth is one of the most startlingly original and riveting books I've read in a long time. Erin Swan's gaze at the heaven and hell we humans create wherever we go is brutal and unwavering. What a thrilling, inventive, and gorgeously written debut!" —Helen Schulman, author of Come with Me

"In her elegant and elegiac Walk the Vanished Earth, Erin Swan keeps her heart and imagination balanced between the past and the future. Whether she's writing about Kansas or Mars, she absorbs you not only in the plight of individual mothers and children, but in all of the children of Mother Earth. This is climate fiction at its finest and most thoughtful." —Kathleen Rooney, author of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

“Walk the Vanished Earth soars past familiar alternate history and post-apocalyptic narratives to create something altogether new: an oracle’s dream of the apocalypse we live in now, a tender study of human ambition and frailty, and a gorgeous, gripping, truly innovative work of art.” —Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

"Walk the Vanished Earth is a sweeping and astonishing exploration of what hope looks like in times of uncertainty, in the midst of devastation. Massive and ambitious in scope, but executed with precision and intimacy, Swan’s debut considers legacy and how trauma, both human and environmental, ripples through generations, through existence. In the end we’re left considering fate, agency, destruction, and what endures." —Meredith Westgate, author of The Shimmering State

"Erin Swan braids a strange and glorious vision that sweeps across arcs of time and galaxy without ever losing sight of the human heart. In this gorgeously written chronicle, the characters, earth, and new planets alike must wrangle their dreams born of tragedy, and transmute them into hope. This is like a Cormac McCarthy desert tale meets Margaret Atwood’s attentiveness to the failures of capitalism and human desire, but with a startling clarity all her own. She offers us a survival beyond climate change that will buoy you up by the end, without ever flinching from horror." —Brenda Peynado, author of The Rock Eaters