History can change in the blink of an eye.
In Resurrection Day , Brendan DuBois alternative history thriller, the blink never had a chance to happen. Instead, the Cuban Missile Crisis became the Cuban Conflagration, a rain of nuclear fire that incinerated all of the Soviet Union and choice portions of the United States. Set 10 years after the inferno, the novel presents a U.S. one step away from third world status, dependent on the kindness of its former mother country, Great Britain, pockmarked with black glass craters where cities once existed, and blemished with radioactive hot zones. In a land where food and hope remain in short supply, the press is censored, surviving members of the Kennedy Administration are imprisoned as war criminals, and the immolated young President s name is spoken as a curse, a cult keeps alive his name and the possibility of his eventual return. Existing in this dispirited world is the equally disheartened Carl Landry, a Boston Globe reporter and military veteran with memories he d prefer to lose.