Sunshine: The Author’s Edition by Alyssa Cooper

When ozone levels plummeted, the world changed. There’s no going back.

This is a world where sunshine can kill. Where there are heavy steel shutters on every window, and underground tunnels for safe passage. Where citizens nourish themselves with synthetic vitamins and rationed food, living a life in darkness, never seeing the sun.

This is the only world that eighteen-year-old Manda has ever known. As this strong, passionate girl struggles to bloom in a hard and unforgiving world, she finds a single comfort; Jordy, a man who delicately shows her how beautiful life can be. But then the letter comes.

Everything is changing, all over again.

Manda will soon be evacuated from her home, transported across the country to a place where the days are shorter, where it still rains, where the sun is less deadly. There’s only one catch; Jordy may not be going with her.

She bides in agony, fighting to fit as much living into her last few weeks as she can, while she waits to learn if she will soon lose the only man she’s ever loved.

SKU: B00M8PUQJK Category: Romance Tags: alternate history, Alyssa Cooper, climate change, environment, Future, love story, sci fi, science fiction, sunshine

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About the author:

These are the stories I want to tell. I want to find the humanity – or lack there of – in everything.”

What inspired you to write your book?

So, I was forced to write her a new story instead.

Here is a short sample from the book:

Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night to realize that I haven’t been breathing. Remembered snippets of dreams of drowning, of suffocation, of hanging. I sit up, my lungs tense and aching and empty, and struggle for what seems an eternity to fill them. A pain like penetration, a searing cold, and then it settles into relief. That first breath feels like birth.
***
When I open my eyes, I know it’s far too early to be awake. The heat in my room is stifling; my thin pajamas are sticky with sweat, clinging to my body, and the air feels thick. The sun is still up, and I wish that I was asleep. I wipe my face on the corner of the sheets, repulsed by the salt welling out of my skin. It shouldn’t be possible for a person to sweat this much. I should be a human raisin by now, curled like a fetus, all wrinkled and dry.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I claw my hair back off my cheeks, picking at individual strands that seem glued to my skin. Wetting my fingers in a glass on the nightstand, I rub the water into my neck, my shoulders, consider tipping the entire glass over my head. I scratch my thighs viciously with both hands; the sweating makes me itch. I’m covered in tiny scabs, places where my fingernails have broken the skin.
The clock beside me reads six o’clock, and I know that it’ll be almost two hours before I can leave the house. A bitter taste slides up my throat, and I stand quickly, ripping off the tank top and shorts that I slept in. As if it will actually make a difference. I stand in the middle of my bedroom in just my panties, with my eyes shut tight, struggling to steady my breathing. I want to hit something. Instead, I stay perfectly still, waiting for the sweat to dry.
I look down at my white skin, translucent, blue and purple rivers winding just below the surface. I wonder what I would look like if I ever saw the sun. In old pictures, no one looks like this. Even my other was golden brown, back when she was my age. Maybe my eyelids wouldn’t be blue anymore.