World Made by Hand

“What’s after Armageddon? No government, no laws, no infrastructure, no oil, no industry…and sometimes a sense of relief. In Kunstler’s richly imagined World Made by Hand, the bone-weary denizens of Union Grove…manage to plant a few seeds of human decency that bear fruit.” —Cathleen Medwick, Oprah Daily

For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Following a cascading set of catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemics—they are doing whatever they can to get by. The outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. The townspeople’s challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields, and rivers—no longer polluted—replenished with fish. Celebrated cultural critic and author of the runaway nonfiction bestseller The Long Emergency James Howard Kunstler returns with the World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades from now. This extraordinary novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, cements Kunstler’s place as an important voice in the debate over our country’s future.

© 2025 Simon & Schuster Audio (Audiobook): 9781668159033

Release date

Audiobook: July 29, 2025