The Frugal Chariots

"The stories we tell are frugal chariots that carry us through our days."

In the aftermath of a virus that reset the world's calendar to year zero, a boy named Sage wakes in an abandoned army hospital on the island of Midlin - no memory of how he got there, only a cat, a notebook, and the wreckage of everything he has survived.

Sage is no hero. He is a former child soldier carrying guilt he cannot put down, afraid he will repeat every failure, abandoned by a brother he barely knew he had. And yet, impossibly, the task that falls to him is enormous: help save what remains of the human race.

Told across four voices - Sage's raw journal entries, the memos of a geneticist who sees something extraordinary in his DNA, the diary of a woman rebuilding herself from the rubble of a collapsed civilization, and the quiet reflections of the oldest living human on earth - The Frugal Chariots is a sweeping, deeply human novel about survival, family, folly, forgiveness, and what it means to finally find your way home.

The Frugal Chariots began during Rio Murphy's chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was set aside, returned to, set aside again - and finally finished after a second cancer diagnosis and a pandemic. It is, as she puts it, her pony: the thing worth finding at the end of a yard full of manure.