It’s terrifying when fiction becomes reality.” São Paulo, Beijing, Moscow, and even Mexico City might tap-out next. And when it comes to drought, Cape Town isn’t alone. “It seems there’s always a freak typhoon, earthquake, or drought. “Unfortunately, Dry is becoming more and more relevant every day,” Jarrod observed. The authors agreed that the plot became increasingly pertinent as the book’s pub date approached. “We were actually living through a similar experience as our characters, which helped us understand and convey their actions and emotions.”
“When we couldn’t find any water to buy, we had to get into an evacuation mindset,” said Jarrod. The authors found additional, unexpected inspiration for the novel while visiting family in Savannah as Hurricane Irma struck the area in September 2017. “In Cape Town, it’s called ‘Day Zero,’ and in Dry we call it the ‘Tap-Out,’ but the parallels are creepy.”Īnd the parallels persisted. “When we were about halfway through the book, we started hearing about the critical water shortage in Cape Town, and that the city was approaching the point where water would be shut off to residents and redirected to critical service,” Jarrod recalled. So that got us thinking about what could happen if so many millions of people were struggling to survive without water.”Įerily, their fictional storyline continued to reflect real-life natural disasters. In California, we are constantly dealing with drought, and the possibility of the state running out of water has become frighteningly close. “Jarrod came up with the concept of a society in which critical services are about to be shut off, and the pieces of Dry began coming together. “I think that our story was one of the best in the book, and we wanted to work on something else together,” Neal explained. Neal and Jarrod began talking about collaborating on a novel a few years ago, after co-writing a piece for 2015’s Unbound, a story collection set in the world of Neal’s Unwind Dystology.
The California residents are all too familiar with the harrowing and tragic consequences of severe drought and uncontrollable wildfires, and their home state’s recent, and ongoing, struggles with both fueled the premise of their YA thriller, in which a teen is forced to make life-and-death decisions for her family when a drought escalates to catastrophic proportions.
Father-and-son authors Neal and Jarrod Shusterman didn’t have to search far to find inspiration for their first collaboration, Dry, out this month from Simon & Schuster with a 200,000-copy first printing.
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