A Gift Upon the Shore

Plot introduction

"Set in the near future, A Gift traces the first generations to survive nuclear war and its aftermath. Writer Mary Hope and painter Rachel Morrow scratch out a meager existence on a farm (called Amarna) on the Oregon coast. They are determined to collect and preserve for a new civilization all the great books of western culture. Farther down the coast lives the Arkites, a fundamentalist group that denies all knowledge not found in the Bible. After a plague strikes the Arkites Mary agrees to take in a few survivors on the condition that she be allowed to educate the children as she sees fit".

From the back cover of the backinprint,com paperback edition: A Gift Upon the Shore is a lyrical, haunting story of two women, an artist and a writer, who survive pandemic, the collapse of civilization, and a deadly nuclear winter. Driven by rich and fully drawn characters, this is a powerful, compelling story of a friendship that endures the devastation and finds a purpose for survival: to preserve the books, the shards of a lost golden age, as a gift to an unknowable posterity. Yet this gift is threatened by the only other survivors the women encounter, the people of the Ark, who believe that except for the Bible, all books are evil. A Gift Upon the Shore is a story about remaining human under the worst of conditions, and the humanizing influence of books and art and love.