New Anchorage as the country begins the long process of "reconstruction". The Reunification Plague is also revealed to be the result of a failed attempt by the virologist Gerry Tusk to find a cure to "The Slow". The rest of the world has also seen geopolitical change. After multiple failed revolutions, the states of Northern Africa and portions of the Arab world and Central Asia have united as the Bouazizi Empire, with their capital in Cairo. China and the Bouazizi nations have emerged as the world's dominant economies, and the European migrant crisis has reversed, with refugees from the collapsed European Union fleeing across the Mediterranean to North Africa. In a reversal of great power politics, China and the Bouazizi Empire send aid to the war-torn United States. The Bouazizi Empire also secretly channels funding to the Free Southern States in an attempt to destabilize the United States, which it regards as a rival to its imperial ambitions. Russia is said to have undertaken a period of aggressive expansion and to have renamed itself as the Russian Union. Climate change also has a significant impact on the world. Florida is inundated by rising sea levels and exists only as a small archipelago. In a reference to Guantánamo Bay's Camp X-Ray, Florida's Sugarloaf Mountain has been repurposed as a detention facility. Much of Louisiana is underwater, and New Orleans is entirely abandoned. After intense migration inland from the flooded Eastern Seaboard, the U.S. capital is relocated to Columbus. The Arabian Peninsula is too hot to support life and is instead devoted to solar power production. Simon's wife, Karina, is said to have been born in the Bangladeshi Isles, which suggests extensive flooding in South Asia. Reception Overall, the novel received positive reviews from critics. In The New York Times, book critic Michiko Kakutani compared it favorably to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America. She wrote that "badly melodramatic" dialogue could be forgiven by the use of details that makes the fictional future "seem alarmingly real". The novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2018 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. It also was a finalist for the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was one of five books in the finals of the 2018 Canada Reads contest, placing fourth. In November 2019, a panel of six writers, curators and critics selected