About the Book:
"It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.
As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he's done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered the apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.
With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.
Note from the Publisher:
In January, The Wall Street Journal named The Passage by Justin Cronin as one of the top books that'll be published this year, and the writing has been compared to the works of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Margaret Atwood, among others. In fact, Stephen King was so impressed with the novel that he mentioned it in his Best Books of 2009 column in Entertainment Weekly even though it wasn't even published yet: "One that doesn't appear here is Justin Cronin's forthcoming novel, The Passage. This epic vampire novel won't be out until summer 2010, but you'll want to mark your calendar. Take it from Uncle Stevie, this is your basic don't-miss reading experience."
Special Features Exclusive to this Collector's Edition:
• epic cover artwork by Tomislav Tikulin
• black & white interior artwork by Jill Bauman
• special afterword by the author detailing why he wrote the book
• incredible photo gallery of research trips the author took for the book (including notes from the author discussing his inspiration for key scenes)
• map of a key location hand drawn by the author
• deluxe oversized design
• extremely collectible print run that is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of copies of the edition you'll see in bookstores — and you will NOT see our edition in chain bookstores!
Limited Edition of 948 signed and hand-numbered copies bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn with a satin ribbon page marker and featuring a full-color signature sheet