The Time of Quarantine

the time of quarantine

ISBN 9780984578214

Lyrical, provocative, and deeply haunting, The Time of Quarantine takes us into a near-distant future of post-human environmental collapse to chronicle the tale of a boy raised alone in the woods by computers at the end of the world—or is it? As the sole surviving member of an ill-fated Intentional Community designed to escape world's-end plagues and convinced he is alone on earth, the boy—now a man—is determined to carry out the final wishes of his father and fulfill his stoic duties of being merely human. But when he discovers, as if by accident, that everything he's always imagined to be true is instead a lie, he decides to leave the safety of his little spinning plot of spaceship earth and go back into the world to find out what comes next.

Katharine Haake's The Time of Quarantine is the latest in a recent flurry of distinguished dystopian novels. Like Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, The Time of Quarantine takes place after unthinkable environmental disasters have come to pass, yet Haake's ruined world is far more nuanced than Atwood's and infinitely more tender than McCarthy's. Her post-apocalyptic story of loss and redemption is compelling, but the real wonder is Haake's prose: every paragraph, every sentence its own fantastic realm—equal parts nightmare and dream.
—David Starkey, author of It Must Be Like the World

In her brilliant novel The Time of Quarantine, Haake spins a dream of the future that is intricate, fantastic, and apocalyptic, and yet grounded in the everyday and the domestic. World disasters are filtered through the family and come to rest in the psyches of individuals who are the protagonists of this imaginative and also plausible speculative novel. Like Haake's masterful work That Water, Those Rocks, Quarantine unforgettably evokes the landscape of Northern California's river country, but this novel visits the desert as well for a parabolic symposium about the future. And like her other genre-bending works, this one engages the reader in multiple narratives and viewpoints, raveling and unraveling a story that is disturbing and inspiring, truthfully telling of our planet's woes and also artfully evoking its capacity for rebirth.
—Annette Leddy, Curator and Writer, Getty Research Institute

Themes of growth, rebirth, renewal, and stuntedness, silence and betrayal echo and re-echo through the book...Haake has created a story which is worthy of being called a genuine piece of literary art.
—Seamus Sweeney, at SF Site. Full review here

Dystopian novels are everywhere, but this tale of a boy raised by computers after climatic catastrophe has an arresting lyricism. Readers are in the midst of the story from the first sentence.
– "Goodbye 2012: Terrific Story Collections and Small-Press Bests," Library Journal

...because the author is so brilliant at tapping into fears and unlocking memories that feel vibrant and personal to all of us, it's hard not to feel this book penetrating to the core.
– The Sci-Fi Guys Book Review (full text here)