When Brian Trent calls his retired father, on an evening in the near future, to say, "We're going to the Farm," his father William reacts with alarm. Because Brian, a top reporter for The Washington Post, is really saying that he believes the country's economy is about to crash, and that he and his family are heading for a sanctuary they've prepared in the mountains of West Virginia. William does not believe that America could come apart. Until he sees it start to happen, with unbelievable speed, the very next day. Tribulation: A Novel of the Near Future follows the remarkable and troubled Trent family as they try to find their way through the ultimate collapse. Kathryn, Brian's wife, just wants to live a normal life, and hates what Brian has been putting the family through to try to prepare for catastrophe. Too late, she finds out that clinging to normality in an unhinged world can get you killed. Daniel and Julie Trent are normal teenagers who are about to be challenged beyond anything they have ever imagined (losing cell phone service and the Internet is only the beginning). And then there's William, the powerful patriarch, a skeptic about the prospects of collapse right to the end, who then becomes determined not only to survive against all odds, and to keep his family alive, but to find a better way of life on the other side. In the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World, Tribulation takes a brutally realistic look at the possibilities of the near future in order to illuminate the trends of our time.