Another Enclave

A reader just emailed to ask if I had heard of a book called Enclave by Kit Reed. No. Not at all. So I googled it.

It's put out by Tor, released February 3 of this year. As in last month.

Jeff VanderMeer of the Amazon blog Omnivoracious, says, "Called 'One of our brightest cultural commentators' by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed has a new novel out called Enclave. Others include Thinner Than Thou, which won an ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her short stories appear in venues ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's SF and Omni to The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University."

According to the Publisher's Weekly review, the book is about an ex marine who plans "to make millions while protecting children from the self-destructing modern world. He turns an old Mediterranean monastery into a combined impenetrable fortress and school, and enrolls 100 filthy-rich children," most of whom are trouble makers. Isolated from the rest of the world, they are "fed only canned news stories about wars and natural disasters." And then things go wrong...

Vaguely similar to my book, which is called The Enclave (as opposed to just Enclave), both of which involve a society closed off from the world. Which I suppose is inevitable given the shared title and the fact that enclave means, well, "a distinct territorial, cultural, or social unit enclosed within or as if within foreign territory ". (thanks to Merriam-Webster for that definition)

What's cool is that since I have had all these deadline problems, The Enclave isn't going to release until July, so I think that's a good thing. Plus being part of the Christian Book Publishing industry as opposed to the secular literary/science fiction/fantasy industry (-- Oops. I mean, "general market" literary/sf... industry) sets them apart as well. But still, what a strange thing to discover in the final week of finishing up the book (or at least I hope it's the final week) that another with almost the same title has just been released...