Into the Forest

Into the Forest is a novel by the American writer Jean Hegland, published in 1996 and set in a near-future California in which the systems everyone relied on simply stop working.

Nell and Eva grow up in a house at the end of a long track, several miles from their nearest neighbour and a long drive from town. Their father is practical and self-reliant, so the household is better placed than most when the power fails and the petrol runs out. There is talk of a war overseas and of upheaval in Washington, but no single event explains the collapse, and that is part of how the book works: the world thins out rather than ends. While the sisters wait for the electricity to come back, they eat what is already in the house and learn, unevenly, the skills that will keep them there. Eva is a dancer with ambitions and a life outside the forest; Nell reads and writes down what happens. Their mother's death has already left a hole in the family, and the isolation of the house throws the two of them more and more onto each other.

The book is concerned with the ordinary business of survival, with water and food and firewood and animals, and with what two young women become when the structures that were supposed to look after them are gone.