Hestia Strikes a Match by Christine Grillo; 2023. Hardcover.

Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends: The year is 2023 and the United States has collapsed into another bloody civil war. Hestia Harris is forty, newly single by virtue of abandonment for the Union cause, and her parents are absconding to the Confederacy. She is adrift, save for her coworkers at the retirement village and her best friend, Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old resident, who gleefully supports Hestia's somewhat half-hearted but nonetheless hopeful attempts to find love in a time of chaos and disunion. Let's Not Date a Confederate! Hestia avers as her parents put up a sign proclaiming Make Liberals Feel Sad and Mildred reminds her It'll pass . . . It always does.

Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is an irreverent, incisive, laugh-out-loud interrogation of modern love of all kinds, in all its messy beauty. It asks the seemingly ever-relevant question: How do you embrace an entire life when the whole world is breaking into bits and madness?

Romance