After the Fire

Moonbeam has grown up inside the fence — in the compound of The Lord's Legion, a Texas cult led by Father John, a man of physical magnetism and howling conviction who is lining her up to be his sixth wife. Then the FBI arrives, and the fire comes, and everything she has ever known is gone. The novel moves in alternating chapters between before and after — Moonbeam inside the compound, where Father John's logic made sense even as the suffering accumulated, and Moonbeam in a federal facility, slowly recounting her life to a psychiatrist and learning to trust people who exist outside the only world she ever knew. Loosely based on the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas in 1993. Hill writes the cult from inside its own logic — which is the most honest and most important thing a cult novel can do — showing exactly how a charismatic leader captures people who are not stupid or weak but simply human. The most important YA novel in the coercive control bundle and the one that most directly shows a teenager what the BITE model looks like from inside the experience of living it. Winner of the 2018 YA Book Prize. Carnegie Medal shortlist.