Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.

2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction

Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of viral DNA from a flu vaccine. If detected by the rapid genetic testing at security screens, Alex will be returned to the Federation and a likely death. Her adoptive father developed a gene therapy to mask her g-marker, but it is not fully effective. Every g-screen presents a nerve-racking one-in-ten chance of getting caught.

When her father goes missing, Alex abandons her cloistered academic life in San Francisco for a globe-trotting Commission in a desperate race to warn him of a trap that will destroy them both. As Alex dodges g-screens on her precarious and often-hilarious adventure, a love triangle develops between her and two men: Eric Burton, a commanding and disgraced intelligence officer, and his blood brother, Strav Beki, a charismatic and dangerously unhinged diplomat. Betrayals mount and secrets unravel, building to the most confounding choices that people can face—choices between love, family loyalty, and moral obligation.

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