 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a cult.
The Future, by Naomi Alderman. This novel isn't strictly about a cult, but it is significant to the plot that one of the characters grew up in a survivalist cult, and we get some of the lessons she took from that. The story is about three mega-rich CEOs whose personalities and companies bear a suspicious resemblance to well-known ones in the real world. They all have bunkers and/or private islands in case of the collapse of civilization, and a cutting-edge app that tells them when it's time to go, before the rest of the world catches on. The app goes off, they head for safety, and things definitely don't go according to plan. Interwoven with this plot is a love story between Martha (the cult survivor, and assistant to one of the CEOs) and Lai Zhen, who reports on survivalist technologies and movements. Like Martha, Zhen has a trauma from her childhood that shapes how she deals with crisis. Now, somehow, Zhen finds herself on the island with the CEOs. The twist at the end wasn't a total surprise, but it was set up well, and decidedly satisfying. As in Alderman's book The Power, the title for this one carries several levels of meaning. Martha and Zhen note that the future is what keeps people going, no matter what the past was. The CEOs rely on an app that predicts the future. But as the story shows repeatedly, there's only one way to truly know the future: to create it yourself.
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