Summary

Book 1 opens in a starlet’s abandoned mansion in California, where a couple lives off rationed crackers and cola. A drought has left the American Southwest a barren wasteland and while many citizens evacuate Eastward to labor camps, Luz Dunn, a 25-year-old former model and poster child of the failed water conservation movement, and her boyfriend Ray, a haunted war veteran-turned-surfer, spend their days sleeping, procuring rations, having sex, and aimlessly surviving. Luz turns to biographies of genealogists, explorers, and naturalists like John Muir and John Wesley Powell for comfort. And Ray writes endless lists in a notebook he carries with him of tasks and resources to find.

A scrapbook has various newspaper clippings featuring Baby Dunn—the name she was given by the Bureau of Conservation, who made her the face of their efforts to expand the California aqueducts. A script for...