HOW TO PACK FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Playlist for the Dead author Michelle Falkoff's latest follows a group of young activists who decide to take the end of the world into their own hands, in this contemporary YA perfect for fans of Shaun David Hutchinson and Samira Ahmed.

If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do?

This is the question that haunts Amina as she watches new and horrible stories of discord and crisis flash across the news every day. She always thought she was alone in her fears - that she was the only one lying awake at night worrying about the end of the world.

But among the new students at Gardner Academy, Amina finds a group whose members' worries mirror her own. They join forces, learning survival skills from each other and becoming fast friends in the process.

Still, as their "prepper" knowledge multiplies, so do their regular high school problems, from relationship drama to family issues to anonymous pranks that seem to be targeted specifically at them. Juggling the two parts of their lives forces Amina and her friends to ask one more vital question: is it worth surviving in the hypothetical future if it's at the expense of your actual present?

Michelle Falkoff is the author of Questions I Want to Ask You, Pushing Perfect, and Playlist for the Dead. Her fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, DoubleTake, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently serves as director of communication and legal reasoning at Northwestern University School of Law.