Only the Strongest – novel (e-book)

It's 2030. The world is burning and drowning, and Alaska is the last good place left on Earth: seventy-seven degrees on average, green valleys, clean water. A paradise. Millions are on their way, from Asia, Africa, South America and the scorched cities of the Lower 48. In camps across the Canadian border they wait to get in, and there they compete in the Gateway: tournaments in fighting, chess and a dozen other fields, where only the very best win a green card. Arthit, a Muay Thai trainer from a Bangkok under water, and Valentina, a twelve-year-old chess player from Peru who has lost everything, fight to survive and for each other. In Anchorage, President Daniel Hale is keeping a secret that could tear the country apart. Only the Strongest is a gripping, heartbreaking novel about courage, love and the price of paradise.

• A gripping dystopian novel set in Alaska in 2030
• Fighting, chess and love in the refugee camps of the Yukon and British Columbia
• A President with a dark secret
• Suspense, joy and grief, and an ending that leaves you wanting more
• Approx. 76 pages
• EPUB for e-readers and PDF for phone, tablet or print

Prologue: Eighty-Eight Degrees in February

It was eighty-eight degrees in Anchorage on the day President Daniel Hale signed.

It was ten past six in the morning, and the sun was already high over the Chugach Mountains. Through the window of the new Executive Residence on the bluff above Cook Inlet he could see the palm trees on the Park Strip, planted three years earlier as a joke by a mayor who wanted to show that Anchorage had a sense of humor. Nobody laughed at them anymore. They had grown twelve feet tall.

He remembered the winters. He remembered being ten years old and skiing the trails at Kincaid Park in February, with frost on the scarf over his mouth and a thermos of cocoa in his backpack. He remembered the sound of skis in cold, squeaking snow, a sound his own daughter had never heard.

Now Alaska was the last good place.

It hadn't happened in a single day. It had happened the way a bathtub fills: slowly, slowly, and then it overflows. The jet stream had shifted. Heat domes sat over the Lower 48 for months at a time; Phoenix was empty, Houston was underwater, and the smoke from the western fires turned the sun red from California to Maine. The seas rose over Asia and Africa, drought broke South America, and the fires took what was left. And in the north, between the mountains and the inlets, where it had always been too cold, it was suddenly just right. Seventy-seven degrees on average. Rain at night. Green valleys from Ketchikan to Fairbanks.

The federal government had moved north in 2028. Congress met in a converted convention center. The Supreme Court sat in a high school in Wasilla. The new frontier, the papers called it. The last paradise.

And everyone wanted in.

On the desk in front of him lay a four-page document. It was stamped TOP SECRET at the top, and below that, in small letters: Committee for Population Security. The Selection Program. Classified under the National Security Act.

He had read it twelve times. He had written half of it himself.

The Alaska Zone could take two hundred thousand people a year. Maybe three hundred thousand, if you pushed. There were four million in the queue.

… The excerpt continues in the book.

• Prologue: Eighty-Eight Degrees in February
• 1. The Water
• 2. The Ice That Disappeared
• 3. Camp 7
• 4. The President
• 5. The Arena
• 6. The Board
• 7. Amani
• 8. The Professor
• 9. Camp Zero
• 10. Sarah
• 11. The Tiger
• 12. Friday Night Arena
• 13. The President's Game
• 14. The Border Bridge
• 15. The Choice
• Epilogue: Homer

Format: E-book as EPUB (Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Kindle via “Send to Kindle”) and PDF.. Made with the help of AI and tested by our quality control. Not tax, accounting or legal advice. Terms and right of withdrawal