This month we will be reading Kashana Cauley's debut novel, The Survivalists.
“A great and engrossing read, Kashana humanizes a way of life that is often made fun of and makes the reader understand why someone would go to such great lengths to prepare for the future, so much so she almost sold me on those Life Preserver soy bars!” —Trevor Noah
In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner.
Kashana Cauley is a television writer (The Great North, Pod Save America on HBO, The Daily Show), a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and a former antitrust lawyer. She’s also written fiction, nonfiction and humor for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, and many other publications. The Survivalists is her first novel.