The Ocean Bound

Land is dead. The sea is all that's left.

When the world becomes unlivable, JD escapes aboard the Anthem with his younger brother Theo and a scattered group of survivors. In a world where the land itself has become deadly, the sea is the only place left to run. But life on the ocean is no safe refuge. Every day is a fight for food, fuel, and survival, and the weight of responsibility on JD's shoulders grows heavier with every passing year.

As the survivors begin transforming the Anthem from a place of escape into something that feels dangerously close to home, JD learns that survival is about more than staying alive. It is about loyalty, sacrifice, grief, and the families people build when everything else has been taken from them. In the middle of fear and loss, they create something fragile, messy, and worth protecting.

Then, nearly three years later, just as life on the water begins to feel almost steady, new arrivals appear on the horizon, bringing rare knowledge, unfamiliar opportunities, and the promise of something better. Most people see hope. JD sees the things that do not fit - the silence beneath the smiles, the careful answers, the feeling that something is wrong in ways he cannot yet explain.

As tension tightens around the people he loves, JD is forced to choose between the hope they desperately need and the instincts warning him that danger has already found its way inside their world. Because if he is right, the greatest threat to the Anthem will not come from the poisoned land or the open sea.

It will come from the people they let in.

A haunting and heartfelt YA post-apocalyptic novel about survival, found family, loyalty, and the cost of trusting the wrong people.