C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, was about the wild west during the gold rush. Her second novel explores another world ravaged by greed. Set in the near future, Land of Milk and Honey imagines the planet’s devastation after an environmental catastrophe has shrouded the world in smog: “Biodiversity fell… Scientists bickered over the smog’s composition and politicians over whether pollution or lax carbon taxes or China or nuclear testing or America or Russia were to blame, and all the while the darkness, slightly acidic, ate its way through fertile fields.”
