Forty Days at Kamas

The Kamas Trilogy seriesbook 1 of 1Next:Star Chamber Brotherhood(2010) →

Inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of a Soviet labor camp revolt in Gulag Archipelago, Volume III, the story follows political prisoners and security officials at a corrective labor camp in Kamas, Utah, where inmates seize control during the summer of 2024.

Read more

Kamas, Utah. 2024.In the totalitarian dystopia that America has become after the Unionist Party's rise to power, the American West contains vast Restricted Zones dotted with ghost towns, scattered military garrisons and corrective labor camps where the regime disposes of its real and suspected enemies. Kamas is one such camp.

On a frigid March night, a former businessman from Pittsburgh, Paul Wagner, arrives at a labor camp in Utah's Kamas Valley, a dozen miles east of the deserted resort town of Park City, which prisoners are dismantling as part of a massive recycling project.

When Wagner arrives, he is unaware that his eleven-year-old daughter, Claire, has set off to Utah to find him after becoming separated from her mother at the Philadelphia Airport. By an odd quirk of fate, Claire has traveled on the same train that carried her father into internal exile.

Only after Wagner has renounced all hope of survival, cast his lot with anti-regime hard-liners and joined them in an unprecedented and suicidal revolt does he discover that Claire has become a servant in the home of the camp's Deputy Warden. Wagner is torn between his devotion to family and loyalty to his fellow rebels until, on the eve of an armored assault intended to crush the revolt, he faces an agonizing choice between a hero's death and a coward's freedom.

In Forty Days at Kamas, author Preston Fleming offers a stirring portrait of a man determined to survive under the bleakest of conditions and against formidable odds. Fleming's gift for evocative prose brings the characters and events to life in a way that arouses emotional tension while also engaging the reader's intellect with fundamental questions about the future of American society.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 336 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Forty Days at Kamas? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Forty Days at Kamas. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Transient Shares dystopia, science fiction
  2. The Warrior Race Shares dystopia, science fiction
  3. 2020 Season 1 The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series Shares science fiction
  4. Occupied Shares dystopia, science fiction, fiction

“People who read Forty Days at Kamas tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Sleepers
  2. No Shelter
  3. Botanicaust
  4. The Passenger

“If you want more of the same (dystopia), start with these.”

  1. Voyage to Kazohinia
  2. Provoke Not The Children
  3. Waning Moon
  4. The Book

“If it was the science fiction that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Dustfall, Book One - Shadows of a Lost Age
  2. They Is Us
  3. Into Shadow
  4. Keyhole Factory: A Novel

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor
  2. No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
  3. Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story
  4. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II