I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the EDGE OF THE KNOWN WORLD by Sheri T. Joseph Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

About The Book:

Author: Sheri T. Joseph

Pub. Date: September 3, 2024

Publisher: SparkPress

Formats:  Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Pages: 328

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/EDGE-OF-THE-KNOWN-WORLD 

Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.

2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction

Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of viral DNA from a flu vaccine. If detected by the rapid genetic testing at security screens, Alex will be returned to the Federation and a likely death. Her adoptive father developed a gene therapy to mask her g-marker, but it is not fully effective. Every g-screen presents a nerve-racking one-in-ten chance of getting caught.

When her father goes missing, Alex abandons her cloistered academic life in San Francisco for a globe-trotting Commission in a desperate race to warn him of a trap that will destroy them both. As Alex dodges g-screens on her precarious and often-hilarious adventure, a love triangle develops between her and two men: Eric Burton, a commanding and disgraced intelligence officer, and his blood brother, Strav Beki, a charismatic and dangerously unhinged diplomat. Betrayals mount and secrets unravel, building to the most confounding choices that people can face—choices between love, family loyalty, and moral obligation.

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About Sheri T. Joseph:

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Giveaway Details:

5 winners will receive a finished copy of EDGE OF THE KNOWN WORLD, US only.

Ends September 17th, midnight EST.

DNA & EDGE OF THE KNOWN WORLD

In my novel Edge of the Known World, a brilliant young refugee is caught in era when genetic screening tests  – like 23AndMe – make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The idea for the story came from mention in a lecture I went to years ago about how Hitler had tried to develop a blood test to detect Jewish and Gypsy children who looked Aryan enough to be hiding in the open with German or Polish families. Such a test was not possible back then, but I wondered how that would translate with modern science and tech—not just for any of the “inferior” ethnic groups during WWII, but in other historical events around the world, where people who did not stand out by physical appearance, and were perhaps even themselves unaware of their background, would have faced deadly consequences. What if in the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu militias had a screening test to detect Tutsis? Dalits who blended with the upper castes in India? Serbs and Bosnians, Chinese in wartime Japan, too many slices of American history, and countless others.

The problem, of course, is that technology has evolved, but people have not. Recent news was a hack into 23AndMe that stole information on accounts with Ashkenazi and Chinese ancestry to sell on the dark web: https://www.wired.com/story/23andme-credential-stuffing-data-stolen/