Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel

Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel

<b><b>"Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing.</b>”<br><b>--Keith Donohue, <i>The</i> <i>Washington Post<br></i></b><br><b>Winner of Best of Region for the Southwest in PRINT’s 2016 Regional Design Awards</b><br><i><br></i></b><i>Bats of the Republic</i> is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design.<br><br>     In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible...<br>     Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first.<br>     As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. <i>Bats of the Republic </i>is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.