An urgent and electrifying must-read with shades of Octavia Butler and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Library journal calls it "a modern cousin of The Handmaid's Tale."

In 2086, corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last woman alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding.

Seven years ago, midwife Mae Bastet was arrested for infanticide in the fractious Arizona Territory for providing health care to women in need. She was torn from her sons and sent to Buzzard?an experimental private prison deep in the Sonoran Desert, run by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan.

Desperate to reunite her family, Mae tries to keep her head down, swallow her prison-issued hormone supplements, and do her job as a glorified school nurse to Obsityan's army of teenage drone pilots. But when mysterious, improbable pregnancies begin cropping up in her charges, she uncovers a web of secrets that has the power to destroy Obsityan. Mae must choose: stay complicit in Obsityan's crimes or hold fast to her midwife principles and risk never seeing her sons again.

Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian debut that traces the possible trajectory of our current political and technological reality?and the power of our deepest human bonds.

Inez Ray is a California-born, Puget Sound−based writer. She holds a bachelor of arts in creative writing from San Francisco State University and has been a doula and midwife assistant for over a decade. Buzzard is her first novel.