David Boyd

The future is nothing like you've imagined. Neither are its heroes.

"When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace-a company that manufactures cardboard tubes-she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups-because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Pregnant Ms. Shibata...

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...

"Winter has turned to spring, and the collected communities are grudgingly respecting the new borders imposed upon them by the ever-brutal Alpha. But our group of survivors is prepared for battle, having organized themselves into a militia-style fighting force, though they're keenly aware that the Whisperers -- and the horde of dead they mingle with -- pose a threat unlike any they've ever faced. Paranoia, propaganda, secret agendas, infighting --...