Shelter of Leaves: A Novel

* Dystopian fiction has grown as a genre in the 67 years since George Orwell’s 1984 moved the genre to mainstream popularity.

* YA readers have fueled a trend toward entertainment over message, and Hollywood has delivered a number of films with bleak settings and teen characters that struggle through conflicts in restrictive societies over the past ten years.

* Dystopian literature’s adult audience is growing as more literary authors like Margaret Atwood take up the dystopian topics of a world gone wrong, but add a post-apocalyptic layer beyond a political or natural disaster. Adult readers are concerned with a character’s fate and survival in a harsh world.

* Adult readers have an affinity for dystopian topics with the 21st century’s rise in PTSD and trauma-related anxiety and mental illness.

* Approximately 127 million people in the US today have lived in a country at war for one half of their life. (Washington Post, May 2015)