After the Fire: YA Award Winner

Will Hill has won The Bookseller’s YA Book Prize 2018 with his "engrossing, brilliantly realized" novel inspired by the Waco siege, After the Fire.

"The things I’ve seen are burned into me, like scars that refuse to fade." 

Moonbeam, is a  seventeen-year-old  who has been raised from toddlerhood in the Holy Church of the Lord’s Legion, an arid, closed compound outside the fictional town of Layfield, Texas.Their dictatorial leader was known as Father John. The authorities have fire-bombed and stormed the compound and taken Moonbeam and 18 other children from the cult into Federal custody.

The authorities are trying to find out everything they can about Father John and his running of the "Church." Moonbeam must live locked in isolation until she is ready to give up some vial information. Will Moonbeam lead them to the information they so ardently seek or will she stay true to Father John and remember what she's been taught about "Outsiders"?

The story is told in chapters alternating between "Before" (the fire) and "After" and is  loosely based on the 1993 standoff between the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, and federal agents.

Moonbeam has to come to terms with all that she was taught at the compound and what she has come to know as the "real world"                     

                
                What if the only way out of the darkness is to light a fire?