Just Get Home: an intense thriller perfect for book clubs

Bridget Foley

Apr 2021 · Sold by MIRA

About this ebook

"Breathtaking... so much more than a thriller." —Josh Malerman, bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie

"Hits the thriller trifecta: a natural disaster, danger around every corner, and compelling well-drawn characters." —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author

A one-more-page, up-all-night story about two strangers who need each other's help to survive the night after a devastating earthquake shakes Los Angeles.

Beegie is riding the bus when the quake hits. The teenager was heading back to her unhappy foster home, but then she’s thrown into a broken world. Roads crumble, storefronts shatter and people run wild.

Dessa, a single mom, is enjoying a rare night out when it strikes. Cell towers are down, so without even knowing if her three-year-old daughter is dead or alive, she races to get back across town.

As danger escalates in the chaotic streets, Beegie and Dessa meet by a twist of fate and an act of violence. The two form a fragile partnership, relying on each other in ways they never thought possible, and learn who they really are when there’s only one goal: just get home.

“A flat-out thriller [that is] also smart and insightful on timely, important ideas…. Heartbreaking and complicated in the best way… This is addictive reading that changes you as you turn the pages and stays with you long after you’ve finished.” —Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is

Ratings and reviews

Wow, this was a tense, insightfully observant, and all too realistic and disturbing revelation of the unchecked inhumanity and brutality once terror and lawlessness are unleashed following a natural disaster. Dessa was socializing with friends on one side of LA while her toddler was at home with a new babysitter when an earthquake rips the town apart. The challenges from the lack of resources, destruction, and environmental hazards were a lesser impediment to her attempts to return to her child than the dangerous, surreal, malicious, and uninhibited cruelty and barbarism of the citizens she encountered along the way. Bridget Foley ever so aptly captured the fractured underbelly of all levels of society while exposing their anxious inner musings, memories, biased observations, regrets, poor choices, and base natures. The storylines were fraught with distress and taut with angst and impending peril with each encounter. It was riveting, exhausting, compelling, and disheartening, and oh so shrewdly and cunningly paced. Ms. Foley is quite the storyteller, but her evocative words are not ones I’d want to peruse before heading off to the land of nod least I thrash in my sleep.

About the author

Originally from Colorado, Bridget Foley attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and UCLA's School of Theater, Film & Television. She worked as an actor and screenwriter before becoming a novelist. Her first book, Hugo & Rose, was published in 2015.