Jupiter Saves!: A Novel

"White handles her sprawling cast with a deft, confident hand, guiding us into the approaching apocalypse like a modern-day Joseph Heller. Get ready to laugh, cry, and squirm. This is a gutsy, audacious debut." --Darrin Doyle, author of Let Gravity Seize the Dead

A serpentine social novel starring a madcap Willy Wonka for our modern age reflects the relationships between family dysfunction, personal faith, and inescapable global catastrophe.

"Catastrophe has always been good for the candy business!"

Over the last 70 years, Bernard Livingstone has catapulted Jupiter Candy Company to the highest echelons of business dominance. His confectionary monopoly is rivaled only by Hershey and Mars, but even those companies can't hold a candle to Jupiter, especially since the sugar shortages began. Who said a climate-obliterating asteroid hurtling toward earth had to be a bad thing?

In Nicole White's debut novel, a wide swath of characters from myriad walks of life become ever more intertwined with the Livingstones' and their candy empire. Beginning with Bernard's death and the ensuing battle for power between Eugene and Robert, his son and his nephew, White pivots to Eugene's children, Russ and Elizabeth, a disgraced high school gym teacher and a disgraced scientist respectively. Eugene's wife Lois is a philanthropist with a benzo addiction. Robert's daughter Maggie is a closeted lesbian tradwife and doomsday evangelical. Other characters include Reverend Keyes who has been kidnapping non-believers and forcibly baptizing them; Julia who is 17, in love with Russ, and nursing a hysterical pregnancy; Marty, whose terminally ill brother has asked him to assist in his death; and Hansel, the feral raccoon Eugene has been feeding leftovers to.

In the background of these nearly two dozen characters is the looming threat of Janus, an asteroid that will soon crash into earth and decimate humanity if scientists are unable to redirect its path in time. But by some miraculous literary magic trick, White has written an end-of-the-world novel where the apocalypse feels completely inconsequential compared to the daily turmoil of her characters. Instead of a story about the end of the world, White has written a brilliantly zany collective portrait of a society at its breaking point and a family holding onto power by any means necessary.