Edward Ashton

By Carl Slaughter. In his debut novel, Edward Ashton offers a refreshingly different angle on the apocalypse/genetic engineering subgenres in Three Days in April.

THREE DAYS IN APRIL
By Edward Ashton
HarperCollins

Anders Jensen is having a bad month. His roommate is a data thief, his girlfriend picks fights in bars, and his best friend is a cyborg…and a lousy tipper. When everything is spiraling out of control, though, maybe those are exactly the kind of friends you need.

In a world divided between the genetically engineered elite and the unmodified masses, Anders is an anomaly: engineered, but still broke and living next to a crack house. All he wants is to land a tenure-track faculty position, and maybe meet someone who’s not technically a criminal—but when a nightmare plague rips through Hagerstown, Anders finds himself dodging kinetic energy weapons and government assassins as Baltimore slips into chaos. His friends aren’t as helpless as they seem, though, and his girlfriend’s street-magician brother-in-law might be a pretentious hipster—or might hold the secret to saving them all.

PRAISE FOR THREE DAYS IN APRIL

“It’s simultaneously brilliant, hilarious, and terrifying. Ashton’s characters speak in clever, sarcastic dialogue that kept me smiling and laughing while I read about the tragedy at the core of the story (yes, it’s a bit uncomfortable to realize this) but his humor is that infectious and his writing is so smart that I did not want to put this down. His ability to weave a complex, intriguing story from multiple perspectives is admirable and daunting. However, what’s most impactful is Ashton’s ability to take the utopian advancements we see developing, at an exponential rate, in our everyday lives, and unravel them into a dystopian fiction that doesn’t seem all that far off from possibility.”  –  Amazon