Love Is the Drug

Winner of the Nebula award for Best Young Adult Novel

Meet Bird: Emily Bird, the straight-A student with good hair and a perfect boyfriend, with a perfect Ivy-League future laid out in front of her. But a chance meeting with a government agent — at what should have been an ordinary party of Washington DC’s elite — leads to Bird waking up several days later in a hospital bed, with no memory of what happened at the end of the night.

In the meantime, the world has fallen apart: A deadly flu virus is sweeping across the planet, decimating the population and forcing the US to resort to extreme measures. Quarantines. Curfews. Martial Law. And that government agent — the one who changed Bird’s life forever — is certain that Bird knows something. Something about the virus – something about the secret work her scientist parents have been conducting in their lab – something that could damage US interests.

The only person Bird can trust to help her is Coffee, a quiet loner at a neighboring elite DC prep school. Sure, he’s a small-time drug dealer who supplies their classmates with Adderall and pot, but he’ll believe just about any conspiracy theory. And he believes in Bird.

But as Bird and Coffee dig deeper into what really happened that night, Bird realizes that she might know more than she remembers. And what she knows could unleash the biggest government scandal in US history.