Natasha Calder’s Whether Violent or Natural is an unnerving, sinister, and brilliant dystopian novel about the choices we make at the end of the world, posing the question: Who can you trust when there’s almost no one left?

Years after complete antibiotic resistance has brought about global devastation, Kit ekes out an existence on a remote island alongside the taciturn Crevan, who has more recently fled the mainland. With once-curable diseases running riot, desperate measures are in place there: those not yet infected are given experimental vaccines, and those for whom it’s already too late are culled. But Kit and Crevan are safe, protected on their island by a collapsing castle that holds a greenhouse and a well-stocked bunker within its ruins.

When a woman washes ashore—near drowned but clinging to life—the question of her fate threatens the fragile balance of Kit and Crevan’s isolated world. While Crevan wants to keep her alive, Kit isn’t so sure. And there’s more to wrestle with: Kit and Crevan each have secrets—secrets they have been keeping both from each other and from themselves. As the crisis brought about by the drowned woman’s appearance consumes them, the fictions of their shared existence crumble, and the truth begins to emerge.

Whether Violent or Natural is a startlingly original and thrilling novel for readers of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. In the tenseness of its plotting, the gradual unfolding of truth, and in the strange and gripping intensity of its narrator’s voice, Whether Violent or Natural is an intelligent, unputdownable novel that welcomes a huge new talent to the genre.