The Split - Paperback

by Steve Radlauer (Author), Ellis Weiner (Author)

It's 15 years after The Split, when the United States peacefully divided itself into two countries, the Confederation of Conservative States of America (CCSA), the former red states, and the USA, the former blue states. Like a divorced couple living in the same house, they share the continent in an uneasy, tenuous equilibrium.

In the heart of the CCSA, Perfecton, Texas, Lorinda Moon-a twenty-something bartender-discovers that she is pregnant after a one-night stand. But she's a woman with plans, and those plans don't include spending months in the Austin Breeding Center followed by the mandatory marriage prescribed by the laws of the CCSA.

On the run from a Confederated agent obsessed with her capture, Lorinda is taken up by an underground railroad of volunteers dedicated to helping women like her get the medical attention they need. With the assistance of two young men, Lorinda must traverse the ravaged, violent landscape of the CCSA to find safety in the USA. En route she will visit a series of bizarre, seriously whackadoodle "enclaves" dedicated to various political and religious lifestyles, satirical extrapolations of today's red-state insanities. She will discover that nothing-neither her country nor the circumstances of The Split-are what she had been led to believe.

It's Mad Max meets Gulliver's Travels, and increasingly resembles the real USA of 2025.