In an alternate timeline, every New Year's Day, the entire population receives The List. If your name is on it, you have been Listed—notified that you have less than twelve months to live. Except, you can escape this fate with the reception of at least ten pledges: people who vouch you are valuable to society. This is the story of one family's Listing, and the extraordinary ways that we set ourselves free.

Em has never been considered pledgeworthy. Aimless and interested in useless subjects like Shakespeare, she is often overlooked by her more ambitious peers, and lives quietly in the shadow of her younger and more prodigious brother, Jay. Until she meets N, a gifted violinist with a singular ambition, who also happens to be Jay's rival orchestra stand partner. To Jay's great displeasure, Em and N become quick friends, and, slowly, their relationship grows into the sweet, tender thing that makes first loves great. Until it falls apart when N disappears.

A decade later, Em works at a powerful campaign firm that secures pledges for the elite: Saving Humanity One Campaign at a Time. At the start of the new year, Jay gets Listed, and Em knows her mother will expect her to secure his pledges. Except she and Jay have barely spoken in years. When Em is assigned to work on the pledge campaign for a high-profile client who proves to have a strange connection to N, Em finds herself distracted, fixating once again on the past—and the role her brother may have held in N's disappearance.

At once a striking family love story and an empowering illumination of the paths we choose to pave, The Pledge is an indelible portrait of connection, identity, loyalty, value, and hope, and the kind of beautiful redemption that comes with choosing yourself, once and for all.