Engine Summer

In a far future long after the collapse of our world, a young man called Rush That Speaks tells his story. Raised in the gentle, gossiping warren of Little Belaire, he grows up on tales of saints and of the "angels," the people of the lost age whose ruins and machines still litter the land. Inspired to seek his own sainthood, Rush leaves home and travels outward, falling in love, meeting communities who see life in ways he cannot grasp, and slowly uncovering truths about the world and about the act of telling his own tale. Crowley frames the whole novel as a single recounted voice, and the final pages turn that frame inside out.