Salvation City, Sigrid Nunez
Salvation City, Sigrid Nunez
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Salvation City
A Novel

Author: Sigrid Nunez

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 8 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/16/2010


Synopsis

After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what those around him believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell? During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero.

Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art. It is about belief—belief in God and belief in self. As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and a new life to come through an imminent rapture, Cole imagines a different future, one in which his own dreams of happiness and heroism begin to seem within reach.

About Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez is the author of several novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award; Naked Sleeper; and The Last of Her Kind. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature. Sigrid has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, and the New School, and she has been a visiting writer at Washington University, Baruch College, and the University of California, Irvine. She lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jenny on June 10, 2010

I'm ambivalent about this book, which is why I took a few days before attempting to review it. I didn't dislike it, but I also didn't particularly enjoy reading it. First of all, I think the book was mis-pitched. I got the galley at the dystopian fiction panel at BEA (indeed, I snagged one of the las......more

Goodreads review by Nikki on April 22, 2020

Reading this novel when I did - during the COVID-19 pandemic - was a truly uncanny experience. Nunez's fictional pandemic influenza illness bore a striking resemblance to COVID-19, and the consequences for her characters as well as society seemed eerily prophetic. I don't mean to imply that Nunez is......more

Goodreads review by Angela on March 29, 2015

Before we get started, let me clarify the two-star rating....Salvation City is not poorly written, has believable characters in believable situations, and is an interesting way to spend several hours. But ultimately -- and given the way Goodreads' ratings criteria are defined -- two stars and "it wa......more

Goodreads review by Justin on February 23, 2011

Just to be clear: this is really a four star book, but it's been so under-rated that I felt the need to over-rate it. It's much closer to 5 than to 2, or even 1, as many people rate it. Continuing the clarity: this is not the second coming of the Jericho TV series or McCarthy's 'The Road,' or any ot......more

Goodreads review by Lynn on March 27, 2022

Okay, clearly, Nunez is a modern-day Cassandra. Salvation City depicts an incredibly accurate America during a pandemic, receives remarkably bad reader reviews (here at least), and is mostly ignored ... until 2020. (How weird is it to read about 2020 in a novel published in 2011? Very weird, indeed.......more