Year One

Year One is a bit of an outlier for Nora Roberts, given that the author’s vast body of work lies primarily in the realms of romance, romantic suspense, and fantasy trilogies that often center on a single protagonist or a small circle of three interwoven characters. However, with Year One, Roberts steps into dystopian fiction for the first time, crafting the origin story of Fallon Swift, a prophesied savior figure who will dominate the trilogy despite the fact that she herself does not “officially” appear until the final chapter of the first novel. The trilogy’s opening volume is instead dedicated to laying out the groundwork for the broken world that Fallon inherits, as well as introducing the allies she will rely upon and the enemies she must face.

To this end, Year One establishes three crucial circumstances that will shape Fallon’s destiny. First, it chronicles the devastation of “the Doom,” a massive pandemic that kills over 5 billion people (roughly 80% of humanity), creating a global collapse unlike anything in Roberts’s previous work. The novel also introduces the concept of “the Uncanny” (later referred to as Magicks), those individuals whose latent magickal abilities are awakened or amplified by the Doom.