Desert's End

WINNER OF THE SANDY RUN AWARD

About the book:

A remote forest village invaded and sacked, its young daughters herded away to slavery in the camp of a power-mad cult: what might be a story of hopeless misery becomes instead a celebration of ingenuity and will.

The brilliant Korobanti and her resourceful friend Suntu craft escape after escape in an odyssey that carries them through landmarks of human cruelty, from Camp Cobra where girls are abused and worked to death by thugs who don't consider them human; to the clandestine spy post of Eden where they are once again held captive, this time by a military that considers itself enlightened; and finally to the crammed and besieged enclave of Smoke City, where despite constant threats they not only thrive, but create the means to save other girls from the suffering they once endured.

Desert's End is a novel of brutal realism, but also a novel of transcendence.

Publisher's note:

Susan Fox's manuscript Names of the Dead won The Sandy Run Novella Award from Hidden River Arts. The work was then developed and expanded into the novel Desert's End and published by Hidden River.

Hidden River Arts is an interdisciplinary arts organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the unserved artists among us, particularly those outside the artistic and academic mainstream.

From the author:

Desert's End is about kidnapped and enslaved children. It recounts their torment, but also their liberation, their recovery, and their triumphant transformation into the liberators of others.

There is brutality in these pages, as there is too often in the lives of the innocent of this world. There is also lyric beauty, steadfast comradeship, and a route-if only a fictional one-to salvation. Some readers may have to shield themselves against scenes of cruelty in the novel's opening pages. I hope those readers will understand-I hope all of you will understand-that I could not escape writing about cruelty and still be honest about the story I was compelled to tell. I hope that, like my valiant heroine Korobanti and her friends as they transcend atrocity, we can all imagine a world in which atrocity, not salvation, is only fictional.

-Susan Fox

For fans of Mark Sullivan's All the Glimmering Stars, and Isha Sesay's Beneath the Tamarind Tree: You will find Desert's End by Susan Fox an equally powerful, unforgettable reading experience.

Author: Susan Fox
Publisher: Hidden River
Published: 06/10/2026
Pages: 292
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.66d
ISBN: 9798985431773

About the Author
Fox, Susan: - Susan Fox was born in Ohio and has lived in New York, Rome, Paris, and rural Normandy. Her fiction has won the Sandy Run Novella Award and The Hackney Literary Award for the Novel. She's published poetry in dozens of prominent journals and anthologies; an opera to her original libretto about a hidden child in World War II has been performed in New York and Germany; and her screenplay of another Holocaust story was optioned for film. Susan lives now in Manhattan with her husband, physicist Stephen Orenstein.

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