SARAH NEILSON: How did this story come to you? Touching on grief, trauma, desperation, and the complicated nature of love and friendship, the book balances the realities of living in New York City with the absurdity of embracing a fringe lifestyle with pitch-perfect style.Ĭauley spoke with Shondaland about disenfranchisement, real-life Manhattan preppers, grief, love, and the importance of humor in conveying the full spectrum of emotions. As Aretha gets used to life with Aaron, James, and Brittany, she tries to reckon with the increasingly unsettling world of guns, bunkers, and isolation, even as she becomes more enveloped in it.Ĭauley is a former lawyer herself and an experienced TV writer, notably for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, and her humor chops come across perfectly in this fast-paced novel.

When Aretha and Aaron meet on a dating app and fall in love, Aretha eventually moves into the Brooklyn brownstone, which is chock-full of all the necessities needed to survive an apocalypse. Aaron, who also lost his parents, is an entrepreneur who runs a coffee roasting business called Tactical Coffee with his roommates Brittany and James in the brownstone they own in Brooklyn. In New York City, all she’s trying to do is find love, purpose, and enough money to live in the wildly expensive metropolis. The Survivalists follows Aretha, a corporate lawyer with student loan debt carrying the grief from the loss of her parents in a car accident. In her debut novel, Kashana Cauley takes these doomsday preppers to another level, subverting the pop culture narrative in some ways while also meeting it in others. In popular culture, they usually mean someone going overboard to prepare for surviving some form of apocalypse, and often involve stockpiling weapons. Chances are, when you hear the words survivalist and prepper, you have certain ideas about what they mean.

The survivalists by kashana cauley