Book of the Day

From the review

Klune points a black hole at two old men in a used RV and somehow writes the tenderest book of his career. The speculative premise here has no interest in orbital mechanics or space agencies scrambling for a fix: the moon cracks open like a dropped plate, the sky runs through colors it has no business making, and nobody in the story spends a page explaining why. Don and Rodney still fight about the radio. Rodney still complains about the gas station coffee. The end of the world changes almost nothing about the small arguments that make up forty years of marriage, and watching two people keep being exactly themselves while the sky comes apart above the windshield is where the book finds its charge. The road trip is where the speculative premise really goes to work, one stop at a time. Some towns board up and pretend nothing is coming. Some throw bonfires and marry strangers on a Tuesday. A whole stretch of highway crackles with ball lightning that nobody bothers to name or explain, because three weeks from the end of everything, unexplainable is just weather now. Klune turns each stop into a small experiment in how people choose to spend a deadline, and Don and Rodney's marriage becomes the control against it: forty years of ordinary love, tested next to strangers who are improvising theirs in real time, badly or beautifully or both.