by Vincent Yu
First published 2026
Russ pushes his family into the bathtub when the emergency alert screams across every phone in Beckitt, Massachusetts: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Nina fires off a text she can never take back to her daughter. Milly blurts out her secret love. David floors the accelerator and abandons his wife and child. Then the second alert arrives: FALSE ALARM. PLEASE DISREGARD. ALL CLEAR. The missile was fake, but the damage is real. Over the following years, each resident must live with what they revealed about themselves in those terrifying minutes. The relationships they destroyed. The truths they spoke. The people they abandoned. Vincent Yu tracks this community through the long aftermath, as marriages crack, families splinter, and neighbors discover they never really knew each other at all. The false alarm exposed fractures that had been growing beneath the surface for years.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Beckitt, Massachusetts
Period: contemporary
304 pages · Hardcover · Flatiron Books
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness