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Published Nov 2018
312 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Fact and fiction blur after a local girl receives a walk-on role in a Hollywood nuclear disaster film set in her small town.
Arkansas, 1984: The town of Griffin Flat is known for almost nothing other than its nuclear missile silos. MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - is a fear every local lives with and tries to ignore. Unfortunately that's impossible now that film moguls have picked Griffin Flat as the location for a new nuclear holocaust movie, aptly titled The Eve of Destruction.
When sixteen-year-old Laura Ratliff wins a walk-on role (with a plus-one!) thanks to a radio call-in contest, she is more relieved than excited. Mingling with Hollywood stars on the set of a phony nuclear war is a perfect distraction from being the only child in her real nuclear family - which has also been annihilated. Her parents are divorced, and her mother has recently remarried. Her father, an officer in the Strategic Air Command, is absent ... except when he phones at odd hours to hint at an impending catastrophe. But isn't that his job?
Laura's only real friend is her new stepbrother, Terrence. She picks him as her plus-one for the film shoot, enraging her fair-weather friends. But their anger is nothing compared to what happens on set after the scripted nuclear explosion. Because nobody seems to know if a real nuclear bomb has detonated or not.
"Starred Review. A clever, superbly written, laugh-out-loud-hilarious story within a story and movie within a movie about nuclear war anxiety in small-town America. You might not learn to love the bomb, but you will love this book." - Kirkus
"Brashear sprinkles the novel with information about the '80s, offering a nuanced sense of time and what it felt like to grow up under nuclear threat...In this moment where what constitutes fact is up for debate, Brashear's seemingly nostalgic romp is extremely timely." - Publishers Weekly
"Funny, fast-paced, and darkly fabulous ... imagine Wargames redone and served up with a twist." - Leslie Margolis, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Party People and Ghosted
This information about The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amy Brashear has deep ties to the state of Arkansas. She grew up with family near Damascus: home of the infamous 1980 "Damascus Incident," where an accidental explosion in a Titan II silo almost triggered a nuclear war. Inspired by this real event, The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction is her second novel. Her first novel, No Saints in Kansas, was published last year to critical acclaim.
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