Five Years by Teresa Tennyson
$10,000 Grand Prize, 2025 North Street Book Prize Competition
Elise never asked to shepherd her small town through the apocalypse.
Yet here she is, the senior leader of a tiny New England town two years into humanity’s five-year death sentence. Amid dwindling rations and supplies, her job is to lead Middlwich through its last days in relative peace.
But she faces a new menace in the form of political challenger Grant Greene, an authoritarian whose radical new ration distribution proposal threatens to plunge half of Middlewich into early starvation. Adding pressure to the situation is the shocking reemergence of a critical resource.
Middlewich has successfully walled itself off from the outside world, but is it ready to battle the enemy within while saving the human race?
From the North Street critique: "I felt the scale of this story was exactly right, which elevated it over other speculative fiction in the contest. The worldwide catastrophe affects every aspect of the characters' lives, but the focus remains tightly on this small town that the reader has come to care about. We don't need to see the chaos and suffering outside Middlewich's walls because we feel it pushing in on their fragile boundaries at every turn. The characters are well aware that their choices are a microcosm of the human condition, a final verdict on whether humanity can and should survive. The story's central dilemma is also refreshingly different from most climate apocalypse fiction—not whether but how we choose to die."
Read an excerpt from Five Years (PDF)
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