Gather the Daughters

A smoldering debut about an insular community on an island at the end of the world, and the girls who start to question the rules that bind them.

Years ago, ten men colonized an island off the coast of a crumbling nation, where they built a society based on ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the rationing of knowledge and history. Generations later, the community continues to follow that vision, and only the wanderers?chosen male descendants of the original ten?are allowed to leave the island.

The daughters of these men have a strictly ordained future. At the first sign of puberty, they face their summer of fruition, a ritualistic season that catapults them from adolescence to matrimony. When their children have children, and they are no longer useful, they take their final draft and die.

But in the summer, children reign supreme. With adults indoors and the pubescent in fruition, the young run, fighting over food and shelter, free of their fathers? hands and their mothers? despair. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so strange, so horrifying, that she must share it with the others?prompting born rebel Janey Solomon to step up and seek the truth. Trying urgently to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, she leads the girls in an uprising that may be their salvation, or their undoing.

With echoes of Never Let Me Go and The Giver, Gather the Daughters is a dark, haunting, and compulsively readable debut, announcing Jennie Melamed as an unforgettable new voice in fiction.