The storm that hits a quiet village one autumn night doesn't just knock out the power. It ends the world Bailey Vylan has always known.

Bailey has spent his life folding himself smaller than he actually is — quietly anxious, quietly closeted, quietly certain that the safest way to exist is to take up as little space as possible. When the storm gives way to something far more catastrophic, Bailey finds himself alone in a version of home that no longer resembles anything safe: empty streets, dwindling supplies, and the growing, terrifying knowledge that whatever happened didn't just hit Oakley — it hit everywhere.

Then he finds Benji. Or Benji finds him. Sleeping rough in a half-collapsed scout hut, unbothered by an apocalypse in the same easy, unshaken way he seems to face everything, Benji becomes the one steady thing in Bailey's shattered world. As the two of them build something like a life out of the wreckage — scavenging, surviving, falling for each other in the cracks between fear and found comfort — they discover they are far from the only people left. Some of what's out there is dangerous. Some of it is armed, organised, and hunting.

What Remains is a post-apocalyptic new adult story about first love built in the ruins of everything familiar, about the terror and tenderness of surviving alongside someone you can't imagine losing, and about what — and who — is worth holding onto when the whole world falls apart. Book One in a series that does not pull its punches, this is the story of two boys learning to build a life, right up until the moment it's threatened all over again.