Domenica Ruta Bücher

The author grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston where in the 17th century women were hanged as witches, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter a love of stories. Kathi frequently kept her daughter home from school to watch such classics as the Godfather movies and everything by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Despite the fact that there was not a book to be found in her household, Domenica developed a love of reading, which helped her believe that she could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and the crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by. This is the story of the author's unconventional coming of age, a chronicle of a misfit '90s youth and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process.

The fates of a cast of seemingly unconnected people converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday in a thought-provoking debut that brings to mind such novels as Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles. In Domenica Ruta's profoundly original debut novel, the end of the world comes every year. Or at least it's supposed to. On May 3, humanity comes together to anticipate the planet's demise--and to celebrate as if the day were truly their last. Sarah is a bookish teenager infatuated with Kurt, a tattoo artist, whom she met at her parents' Last Day celebration a year earlier. Kurt is still haunted with guilt over his role in the death of his young love and wants to make holiday amends to her family. Karen is a misfit with a dysfunctional background who works at the local YMCA, where she keeps getting into trouble--especially when she sets off to find a long-lost adoptive brother. Her friend Rosette has left the Jehovah's Witnesses to follow a new pastor at the Kingdom of God, where she brings Karen on this fateful Last Day. Meanwhile, in space, a group of international astronauts--an American, a Russian, and a billionaire Japanese space tourist--observe Last Day from afar. With sparkling wit, dazzling vividness, and wild imagination, Last Day is an exciting introduction of a literary talent--and by the end a haunting meditation on the fate of humanity and our planet