California

California is a novel by the American writer Edan Lepucki, published in 2014. It is set after the collapse of the society its characters grew up in, and it attracted a good deal of attention on publication after a television host urged viewers to order it from booksellers other than the largest online retailer.

Calvin Friedman and Frida Ellis are young and have been together long enough to have a routine. They live in an abandoned house in the woods, growing what they can and trading with nobody, and their days are organised around the work of staying fed and warm. The arrangement is lonely, and both of them know that it is not the life either of them would have chosen.

The pregnancy changes the arithmetic. Frida and Cal leave the house to look for the nearest settlement, and what they find is a guarded community whose members have internet access, private security and luxuries that the two of them have been doing without. The novel is about the terms on which a community accepts new people, and about how much of their own judgement each of them is willing to give up for a roof and a doctor.