Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Heavens, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Country of Ice Cream Star. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and Granta, among other publications. The premise of Newman’s The Men (Grove Press) is that all people with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth. Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their 5-year-old son, Benjamin. At dusk, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. And it’s at that very moment that every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world – doctors mid-surgery, drivers behind the wheel, men in arguments and acts of love, children, adults, and even fetuses are gone in an instant. After the Disappearance, Jane enters a world she barely recognizes. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, she focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, a video called “The Men” is broadcast online, showing the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?
