Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction

Year 2098: Charlie works in the fabled “utopia” of the City, where he hopes to meet someone and eventually start a family—a desire that sets him apart from his peers. But since he lost his family in the fire-decimated Western country, he is desperate to create community and connection. When he meets Pinta, a botanical illustrator with a passion for her work, he wonders if she could be the person he’s been looking for.

But forces greater than chemistry pull them together on their first date when Charlie and Pinta stumble upon a grove of super fast-growing trees on an abandoned military base. It’s an exhilarating discovery, until Pinta picks a leaf and the tree retaliates, giving her a nasty wound on the back of her neck.

What follows is a hair-raising and urgent search to find out how these trees came to exist—who planted them, and who created them. Disclosing their discovery to a trusted group of friends and colleagues, they band together in search of answers, to try to stop these deadly trees from spreading before it’s too late.