MOIRA CRONE

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY---
"Robert Penn Warren Award-winner Crone makes her impressive genre debut, mixing standard dystopian tropes with social commentary and a strong literary voice. Malcolm de Lazarus is one of the titular "Not Yet" destined for inclusion in the immortality program run by the Heirs of New Orleans in the year 2121. On discovering a problem with his Trust--a fund partially fueled by his years as a teen actor--he sets off for the New Orleans Islands in search of some answers. Crone fills in Malcolm's--and the world's--story largely via flashback, introducing his mentor, Lazarus, his friend Ariel, and the scientist Lydia Greenmore, who is both connected to and conflicted about the process that has granted her eternal life. In addition to an engaging story line made all-the-more compelling by recent advances in bioengineering, readers will appreciate Malcolm's slightly off-kilter narrative voice. Crone ably mixes styles and does a nice job of creating a portrait of a dark future while remaining accessible.

`IN MOIRA CRONE"S VISION OF THE FUTURE, THE ONE PERCENT ARE IMMORTAl." Popmatters

"A VIVID AND LAYERED IMAGINING OF WHAT'S TO BECOME OF NEW ORLEANS AND HUMANITY IN THE 22nd CENTURY..." Roy Blount Jr.

SPICED WITH REBELLION, ROMANCE AND WATER-BORNE ODYSSEYS--- ECHOES OF DICKENS, JOHNATHAN SWIFT, AND HARRY POTTER..." The Times Picayune.

"I HAVE NOT READ A MORE COMPELLING NOVEL IN A VERY LONG TIME...." Jim Grimsley

"A PROVOCATIVE CONTEMPLATION OF WHAT IT MEANS TO LIVE IN A WORLD OF HAVES AND HAVE NOTS..."Elise Blackwell

APRIL, 2012

It's 2121; the Heirs control society's resources from their lavish walled city-states. Through life extension, they live hundreds of years. Outside, the poor barely survive. Malcolm de Lazarus, twenty, is a "Not Yet," one counting on joining the elite. But when his fortune mysteriously disappears, he must sail to the chaotic New Orleans Islands for answers. On the way, he encounters the darkest side of Heirs' privilege, which threatens everything he knows and loves.

From her vast and tasty imagination, Moira Crone has fashioned a post-apocalyptic picaresque to rival Riddley Walker and Fiskadoro. In The Not Yet, her foundling Malcolm navigates a bizarre, fallen New Orleans as strange and wonderful as the real one.
—STEWART O'NAN, author of Last Night at the Lobster, Songs for the Missing, The Circus Fire, The Odds and Snow Angels

New Orleans has always been an island, and in Moira Crone’s new novel, The Not Yet, the island is literal and the city is flooded for eternity. New Orleans has always been a crossing of worlds visible and invisible, and in Crone’s lyrical prose the intersection includes the future and aliens and transformations beyond our dreams. New Orleans has always signified decadence and death for our gothic region of the South, and Crone’s story begins with a boatman ferrying something very much like a dead man into a place very much like the land of the dead. New Orleans has always created monsters, so why not Crone’s race of Heirs, superbeings who hold Creoles and Cajuns as pets. To classify this novel in any way would detract from its ability to resonate on many levels, as myth, as high literature, as science fiction, as fantasy, with the hints of a graphic novel in the rich imagery and finely honed writing. Malcolm’s odyssey, like a good gumbo, cannot be described but begs to be tasted. I have not read a more compelling novel in a very long time. —JIM GRIMSLEY, author of Dream Boy, My Drowning, and The Ordinary, among others.