The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn  {Review by STELLA} Scenario: You’re standing in the Mall of America looking at the bling. Next thing you know you come to on the floor with a necklace in your hand and the world altered. There is no one around: no checkout operators, no other customers in what only a moment ago was a crowded and bustling hive of commercial activity. What has happened? - a fire alarm, a natural disaster? No: the disappearance of 95% of the world, human and object. Not only are people missing, so are things. Eerily, shelves are bare save for the odd things. No rhyme. No reason. More like a fire sale after the rush, a few items remaining dotted here and there. Meet Mira. The Rending and the Nest is a post-apocalyptic novel with a young woman at its centre. Mira is seventeen when the Rending takes place. Five years on, she is living in a rudimentary community called Zion with a handful of other survivors, plucking an existence out of the ‘piles’, growing basic root vegetables and hunting the odd mammal still in existence. Life is now known as the After and most try not to think about the Before and all that they have loved and lost. Like many other novels of this genre, there is a lack of resources, non-existent infrastructure (this seems to collapse fairly instantly), communication reverting to physical meetings between groups or individuals (in Zion ‘visitors’ are allowed to stay only for a maximum of seven days), and new social structures - usually based on a mash-up of previous social norms, survivalist instincts and piecemeal religious rituals. And as with several recent fictions, the issue of fertility is a key element in this novel. Several novels, perhaps echoing our falling fertility rate in Western nations (due to social or environmental factors) have been concerned with reproduction, lack of fertile women and control of those that can birth - The Handmaid’s Tale was a forerunner. In Schwehn’s novel, she has taken this concept to another level. There are few children left in the After, and no babies have been born for several years. When Mira’s best friend Lana (the community’s prostitute - there are more men than women in Zion) falls pregnant there is curiosity and caution. Lana has a normal pregnancy but gives birth to an object - a plastic doll. As Lana descends into a malaise, the community carries on but is increasingly unsettled by this and subsequent object births from the other mothers. Lana’s depression is broken by the arrival of the charismatic Michael who has come from the Zoo, a place avoided by the Zionists for the rumours they have heard. Michael is recording stories, stories which he will use to lure inhabitants to the Zoo. And here the story really heats up, as Kaethe Schwehn delves into the psyche of survival and power. If you find dystopia intriguing add this one to your reading pile, alongside The Power, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, The Book of Joan and Station Eleven.