The Last Days of California

Jess is fifteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, Waffle House, and gas station along the way. As Jess's belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family. Selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and an Indie Next pick, Mary Miller's radiant debut novel reinvigorates the literary road-trip story with wry vulnerability and savage charm.

“"The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture."”

"[A] terrific first novel... Why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A plangent portrait of American adolescence... [Miller delivers] raw the heartbreaking futility of the Metcalfs’ small triumphs, private embarrassments, and poor decisions with such hilarious precision that you become completely involved in their struggles—and, ultimately, in awe of their abiding hope." -- Elle
"The set-up of the story in Mary Miller’s debut novel is clever and alluring, and what follows does not disappoint – a sharp, sensuously-written road tale that is both a satirical vision of a grotesque society and a down-to-earth coming-of-age narrative told by an appealing anti-heroine who is determined to stay hopeful against all the apocalyptic odds." -- The Irish Times

Mary Miller is the author of the short story collection Big World. Her work has been published in Mcsweeney's Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Oxford American, and other journals. A former Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas, she currently serves as the John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. This is her first novel.

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