Makeshift with author Peter Rock and Karen Russell

Join Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment, in conversation with Karen Russell on his latest novel, Makeshift.

Abandoned on a remote island known as Makeshift, three sisters—Ari, Heiko, and CeCe—believe they’re the last humans on Earth.

These three, left alone after a band of foreigners slaughtered their entire community, must learn to fend for themselves. They fish and forage in the shallow waters of their protected cove, salvage useful treasures from the rusting hulks of ships that ran aground on its offshore reefs, and entertain themselves with half-remembered tales from their time before.

But when they stray beyond the island into a wider, broken world, they find that life may not be as they believed. And upon their return to the island, they face further revelations that strain their bonds, hint that secrets may be everywhere, and affirm their need for one another in the face of a perilous future. Makeshift is a singular novel of hope and survival set on a small rock-bound island in the coastal Pacific Northwest, and a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.

“Lyrical and poignant, Makeshift proves a powerful antidote to the modern world. This must-read novel lures the reader in, not unlike the coastal wrecks that line the island.” —Adam Johnson, author of The Wayfinder

About the Speakers

Peter Rock is the author of eleven previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and John Dos Passos Prize, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters. 

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, The Antidote, was a finalist for the National Book Award and is currently longlisted for the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, Zoetrope, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, and Conjunctions, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.  

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