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Pub date August 27, 2025

FriesenPress

ISBN 978-1038348784

Length 234 pages

Price $32.52 (USD) Hardcover, $20.99 Paperback, $5.99 Kindle edition

Author interview

The second book in Smith-Nochasak’s Taggak Journey trilogy plunges readers back into a scorched future where faith, memory, and survival intertwine in haunting and unexpected ways. The fires of 2036 have consumed Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, leaving behind a wasteland ruled by the Elect—an authoritarian theocracy that enslaves the desperate and sanctifies cruelty. River travels north with her cousin Tag, a descendant of the first shadow runner, and Dr. Andrea Parker, a grief-stricken veterinarian turned reluctant prophet. As they move through hunger, fatigue, and ash-filled air, their struggle turns from survival to a search for meaning.

Smith-Nochasak’s writing balances visceral detail with moments of eerie beauty. She writes pain with a poet’s precision: the physical exhaustion of running through smoke, the smell of damp moss and burning wood, the dull ache of hunger that erodes thought itself. Amid all this devastation, moments of grace persist. River, Tag, Andrea, Flo, and Tammy are sharply drawn, each embodying a different response to loss and survival. The Elect, far from faceless villains, reflect every ideology that wields faith as control. Against them, River’s quiet belief that life can grow from ash becomes an act of rebellion. By the time the reader closes the book, it becomes clear that the novel is not about apocalypse at all, but about renewal through connection—between people, between generations, between the living and the dead, and between humanity and the earth itself. It’s a story that mourns what we’ve lost while insisting that love, courage, and storytelling are the seeds of resurrection. A page-turner.

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