Makeshift (2026)
“Peter Rock is one of my favorite writers, and I loved reading Makeshift, his extraordinary new novel. At once suspenseful and revelatory, Makeshift travels alongside three sisters, the children of parents who led them from the ‘before world’ to an island sanctuary. Now they must navigate their collapsing reality, while carrying a horizon between them. It’s a gorgeously written, terrifying, and tender foray into the heart of what it means to be in relationship to one another, and to our world, which is not over, which is still home. A book for our time and for our species, one that maps our purgatorial stretch of coastline where we seem to be ‘somewhere between lost and finding our way.’”
-Karen Russell, author of The Antidote
“In Peter Rock’s haunting and eerie eleventh novel, young Ari narrates a story of finding and making family after everything has gone wrong. Or have things gone wrong? Rock’s glorious evocation of the natural world yearns for a time before, or in this case, after modern civilization—here, wreck-diving cormorants and trees responding to the north-western breezes serve as a Greek chorus for a world slaked of human intervention. Lyrical and poignant, Makeshift proves a powerful antidote to the modern world by tracing its landscape’s roots. This must-read novel lures the reader in, not unlike the coastal wrecks that line the island of Makeshift.”
-Adam Johnson, author of The Wayfinder
Abandoned on a remote island known as Makeshift, three sisters—Ari, Heiko, and CeCe—believe they’re the last humans on Earth.
These three, left alone after a band of foreigners slaughtered their entire community, must learn to fend for themselves. They fish and forage in the shallow waters of their protected cove, salvage useful treasures from the rusting hulks of ships that ran aground on its offshore reefs, and entertain themselves with half-remembered tales from their time before.
But when they stray beyond the island into a wider, broken world, they find that life may not be as they believed. And upon their return to the island, they face further revelations that strain their bonds, hint that secrets may be everywhere, and affirm their need for one another in the face of a perilous future. Makeshift is a singular novel of hope and survival set on a small rock-bound island in the coastal Pacific Northwest, and a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.