The Completionist: A Novel
Paperback on sale now
One of Entertainment Weekly's "10 prescient new feminist dystopias to read after The Handmaid's Tale"
One of The Chicago Review of Books' Best New Books of June 2018
In a near future in which plummeting birth rates have ominous political and personal implications for women, a young man's search for his missing sister leads him into a disturbing and desperate underworld, where bitter freedoms are bought at a terrible price.
“Effortlessly and immediately convincing, truly tense and exciting, and important, too —we might be headed right there.” — Lee Child, bestselling author of The Midnight Line
After months of disturbing behavior, Gardner Quinn has vanished. Her older sister Fredericka is desperate to find her, but Fred is also pregnant—miraculously so, in a near-future America struggling with infertility. So she entrusts the job to their brother, Carter.
Carter, young but jaded, is in need of an assignment. Just home from war, his search for his sister is a welcome distraction from mysterious physical symptoms he can’t ignore...and his slightly-more-than recreational drinking.
Carter’s efforts to find Gardner lead him to a dangerous underground, where he begins to grasp the risks she took as a Nurse Completionist, caring for other women trapped by the punishing regulations that now define motherhood. But the search for their lost sister also repeatedly leads back to their father, a veteran of a decades-long war just like Carter himself, who may be concealing a painful truth, one that neither Carter nor Fredericka is ready to face.
Reviews for The Completionist:
"You won't be able to put this down."
“A meticulously crafted, suspenseful and timely tale of a world that is at once familiar and strange.”
—Shelf Awareness
"Adcock, a natural storyteller, writes flawed and believable characters... Adcock has created a captivating, if grim, future."
—Publishers Weekly
"Timely and thoughtful...The best kind of speculative fiction, smart and sharp. Its themes and ideas challenge readers while the narrative and characterizations capture and hold their imagination. There’s plenty of dystopian fiction out there, but very little of it is anywhere close to this good … and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any that’s outright better. Powerful and thoughtful, this is a book that will stick in your synapses long after the last page is turned."
"The Completionist captivates the reader right to the very end... Adcock’s story is an incredible journey of a family crisis, which concludes with a very emotional ending."
—Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star
Praise for The Completionist
"Thoughtful, suspenseful, and shot through with dark humor, The Completionist creates a future world near enough to our own that the familiarity stings and sings. Violence, climate change, invasive technologies, and the erosion of women's freedoms--none of this is science fiction, but the novel harnesses these destructive forces toward an original and imaginative end. And the people who inhabit these pages are vivid, defiant reminders of the sustaining powers of purpose, honor, and family love."
—Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet and June
"Intense, chilling, visionary and compulsively readable, Adcock’s dystopian literary thriller takes on environmental collapse and reproductive rights with passion and vivid world-building. Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale are inevitable, though Adcock has her own things to say about the horrific costs of a society bent on controlling women’s freedoms."
—Sari Wilson, bestselling author of Girl Through Glass
"How rare it is to find such a seamless, brilliant combination of action and ideas, unique world and complex characterization. The Completionist unfolds a compelling mystery within a disquieting but strangely familiar world, with a tense, taut atmosphere keeps you turning the pages, and a family you can't help but root for as they try, and often fail, to save each other."
—Julia Fierro, bestselling author of Cutting Teeth and The Gypsy Moth Summer