Written by Tosca Lee
The first time I ever blurted out the words “I want to write a novel” I was home for spring break my freshman year in college. I was telling my dad how I loved that a great book was like a roller coaster with its ups and downs, twists and turns. And then I blurted it out: I want to write a novel.
That day, my dad made me a deal: he’d pay me what I would have made working as a bank teller that summer, if I spent the summer writing that novel and treated it like a job.
It was a no brainer. (I was a horrible bank teller!) So I started my research, gathered my notes and that summer I set to work.
Two days in, I thought, “Wow, this is really hard!” I had no clue what I was doing. But I wrote through it, powered by a dream of seeing my books on a shelf one day, of afternoons spent on the phone with my agent or editor.
The dream didn’t go much further than that at the time. Neither did that manuscript, which rests in a crate somewhere in my basement like a skeleton.
Today, 30 years later as I finish my 12th to-be-published novel, the dream is different. I still want to build roller coasters, but the reason has changed. Because I’ve lost track of the readers who have told me, sometimes through tears, how important novels have been during trying times in their lives: during a difficult marriage, while caring for a sick parent, in the midst of illness, recovery, or psychological challenges. When they couldn’t work, felt alone, or otherwise simply needed to escape an hour at a time.
That was me, once, struggling through my first marriage. Dealing with OCD and anxiety. Needing to slip into someone else’s skin, if only for a while.
Today I don’t consider myself a novelist so much as a purveyor of healthy escapes. It’s a job I am humbly thankful to every reader for, every single day. Because I do it with the belief that we read—and write—not just to set real life aside for a time, make sense of the world, or to have fun (a pursuit I take seriously) but to know, ultimately, that we are not alone.
You may not know me, you may not have read my books. But I’m thinking of you today, as I work at my desk. And I am grateful.
—Tosca
Join Tosca for her newest pairing: The Line Between (January 29, 2019, Simon & Schuster) and A Single Light (September 17, 2019, Simon & Schuster)!
THE LINE BETWEEN BY TOSCA LEE
In this frighteningly believable thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tosca Lee, an extinct disease re-emerges from the melting Alaskan permafrost to cause madness in its victims. For recent apocalyptic cult escapee Wynter Roth, it’s the end she’d always been told was coming.
When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation.
As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life—until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples. That night, Wynter learns there’s something far more sinister at play and that these samples are key to understanding the disease.
Now, as the power grid fails and the nation descends into chaos, Wynter must find a way to get the samples to a lab in Colorado. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter herself.
Filled with action, conspiracy, romance, and questions of whom—and what—to believe, The Line Between is a high-octane story of survival and love in a world on the brink of madness.
“Beautifully written and deeply unnerving!”
—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-Wars
A SINGLE LIGHT BY TOSCA LEE
In this gripping sequel to The Line Between, which New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava calls “everything you want in a thriller,” cult escapee Wynter Roth and ex-soldier Chase Miller emerge from their bunker to find a country ravaged by disease, and Wynter is the only one who can save it.
Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty others, Wynter and Chase emerge to find the area abandoned, no sign of the group that was supposed to greet them—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the IV antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs in order to live.
As the clock ticks down on Julie’s life, Wynter and Chase embark on a desperate search for medicine and answers. But what they find is not a nation on the cusp of recovery thanks to the promising new vaccine Wynter herself had a hand in creating, but one decimated by disease. What happened while they were underground?
With food and water in limited supply and their own survival in question, Chase and Wynter must venture further and further from the silo, only to come face-to-face with a society radically changed by global pandemic, where communities scrabble to survive under rogue leaders and cities are war zones. As hope fades by the hour and Wynter learns the terrible truth of the last six months, she is called upon once again to help save the nation she no longer recognizes—a place so dark she’s no longer sure it can even survive.
“A breathless thriller of nonstop suspense.”
—Book Reporter
The Line Between books are in development for television! Learn more here!
About Tosca:
Tosca Lee is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of a dozen books including The Line Between, The Progeny, The Legend of Sheba, Iscariot, and the Books of Mortals series with New York Times bestseller Ted Dekker. Her books have been translated into 17 languages and optioned for TV and film. A notorious night-owl, she loves watching TV, eating bacon, playing video games and football with her kids, and sending cheesy texts to her husband. You can find Tosca at ToscaLee.com, on social media, or hanging around the snack table.
