The Survivalists

A Novel

By: Kashana Cauley

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Shondaland’s Best Books

Vulture’s Most Anticipated

A Phenomenal Book Club pick

One of Vogue’s Best—and Most Anticipated—Books of 2023

"[A] lethally witty debut” —Laura Warrell, The New York Times Book Review

“A great and engrossing read, Kashana humanizes a way of life that is often made fun of and makes the reader understand why someone would go to such great lengths to prepare for the future, so much so she almost sold me on those Life Preserver soy bars!” —Trevor Noah

A single Black lawyer puts her career and personal moral code at risk when she moves in with her coffee entrepreneur boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping roommates in a novel that's packed with tension, curiosity, humor, and wit from a writer with serious comedy credentials.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner.

For readers of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Zakiya Harris’s The Other Black Girl, The Survivalists is a darkly humorous novel from a smart and relevant literary voice that's packed with tension, curiosity and wit, and unafraid to ask the questions most relevant to this generation of Americans: Does it make sense to climb the corporate ladder? What exactly are the politics of gun ownership? And in a world where it’s nearly impossible for young people to earn enough money to afford stable housing, what does it take in order to survive?

©2023 by Kashana Cauley (P)2022 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved

Critic reviews

“Narrator Bahni Turpin explores the ways in which individuals can be swept up into something much larger than themselves. Turpin voices all the characters with sympathy and grace, giving depth and a certain amount of sympathy even to villainous characters. A perfect listen for fans of social horror.”—Library Journal

“Cauley's satirical comedy about survivalists, gun dealing, and finding happiness is masterfully narrated by Bahni Turpin.… When Aretha moves in with Aaron, Turpin captures her love-blind naïveté and acceptance of his survivalist friends, Brittany and James. Turpin then delivers Aretha's shock during her first gun run with the duo, her euphoria after going on later gun runs with James, her isolation when Aaron is out of town on business, and her anger when Aaron consoles Brittany after their house collapses.… Turpin embodies a new and improved Aretha, one who looks out only for herself.”—AudioFile Magazine

“Acclaimed narrator Bahni Turpin (Children of Blood and Bone (2018), The Hate U Give (2018)) is pitch-perfect, hitting the right notes of sadness, sarcasm, and desperation while also emphasizing the thrill that Aretha finds when she gets down into the grittier parts of life. A smart and humorous way to tell a story of precarity and its ramifications, The Survivalists is worth your time.”—Booklist

Boring

Boring and could not finish…read for a book club, but just could not keep listening

It's ok

The first half started ok, but by the middle I didn't really care about the characters. This was not a book that I was really excited to see where it was going.

Started out great and had a few funny parts

Great start for a first time author. Listed to the Author on NPR and was so excited to jump in. It started out great but lost momentum and got lost in the minutia at times. Should have taken more time on the ending instead of rushing in the last 25min of book. It was a great listen because you can’t go wrong with Bonni.

It filled the time for my drive

I consumed this passively — audiobook — otherwise I would not have continued the effort. Perhaps the flat delivery was what put me off. Might be better as a read. Once I got into it I finished it to see how it wrapped up. As a reader I never got invested in the characters.

Not Much of a Storyline

I didn’t feel like much happened until the last 30 minutes of the book. I had a hard time finishing this book.

Meh

I kept waiting for the story to go somewhere. I loved the narration, but the story seemed to be missing either more action or a bigger “lesson”

Started off interesting…

The story started off interesting and about halfway through I had to force myself to finish the book.

Would not do again

The story, characters, and narrator were just not appealing enough to give hours of my time

Great writing, okay story

Great first effort from this author. The plot was a little chaotic and could have used a deft editor. But the characters were well drawn, the writing was charming and funny and the story was completely original. Interesting enough to make me want to read this author’s next work.

This is not worth your time

Given that we are decades away from even coming close to having enough black females represented in the literature. It pains me to give this type of book a bad review.

Likewise, bad reviews are generally not worth writing, because at the end of the day not everything is for everyone and my favorite book might not be worth someone else’s time at all.

This work is worth painting, however because it is actually offensive in relation to the subject matter it presents and given the minorities at its center this harmful and offensive presentation should not be popularized.

As an attorney of color, there is simply not enough time in the day to write how wrong this depiction of attorneys of color is. But beyond in accuracy, and also devolve, somehow into the worst stereotype wear an Ivy League lawyer is suddenly holding people up at gunpoint has some sort of supposedly exciting twist. It is not credible and actively harmful because at the end of the day, it is nothing but a sad racist trope, if you are writing about an existing world with existing people who have to be as accurate as possible, and if you take a literary license, it better not be to fall down into tired, racist stereotypes

The story does not hold together and does not really hold interest either, but again that can be a subjective assessment. What is a subjective as the fact that it feels to do those things while engaging in terrible stereotypes and flat misunderstanding, I would people who are actually in the main character situation do on a daily basis.

I wish the author nothing but success in your future endeavors, which will hopefully regard topics, and she is more familiar with so that she can accurately depict them without falling into harmful stereotypes.