Where The Ashes Find Their Grave Launches on Labour Day: Right on Schedule for the End of the World
September 7, 2026 | For Immediate Release
Chicken House Press announces the release of Where The Ashes Find Their Grave, the highly anticipated second book in Alanna Rusnak’s series The Path That Takes Us Home
The date is deliberate. In When the Trees All Burned, self-proclaimed prophet Rajiv Montgomery Noah named Labour Day as the day the world would end. Book one counted down to it. Book two begins the moment the countdown runs out—because Labour Day has arrived, the trees have already burned, and the survivors inside Rajiv’s sealed sanctuary must now answer a harder question than what if: what now?
Where the Ashes Find Their Grave picks up inside Eden, the survival dome Rajiv built over an abandoned mine near Thunder Bay to shelter the two hundred souls he deemed worthy.
Rajiv Montgomery Noah spent his life building a sanctuary for the worthy. He chose two hundred souls, wrote them a constitution, and sealed the gates against everything that burned. On paper, it was beautiful.
But a house built on a cracked foundation will always find its fault line. Inside Eden, a man with a borrowed name carries old world appetites into the new one. The batteries are draining as the sun refuses to show her face—and the only man who can see her is trapped four hundred kilometres above the earth, utterly beyond reach. And beneath the surface of Rajiv’s perfect system lies a catastrophic secret—one he buried before the fires came—that may render everything he built, every sacrifice, every soul he saved, meaningless.
Beyond the dome, the silence may not be as total as they feared. But even the fragile hope of other survivors only sharpens the questions Rajiv can no longer avoid: What does it mean to save humanity if you have already broken the thing that makes it human?
There is only one answer. And it will cost him everything.
Rusnak returns to a cast readers have already come to love—a comedian, a singer, two adult children of the prophet, and Edgar the cat—while widening the lens to new vantage points, including one floating four hundred kilometres above a dying planet. The result is a story that trades the shock of the apocalypse for something harder to sit with: the slow, unglamorous work of deciding who to become once the world is already gone.
Early readers have called it an even more powerful follow-up to the first book in the series:
“Rich, emotional, and insightful, Where the Ashes Find Their Grave is a story you don't want to miss,” says Jennifer Moffatt, author of Flirty Dancing. “Book one blew up the world, book two asks how do we survive with what's left.”
“There is no sentimentality here, no false comfort, only the hard soul-searching work of people learning to build new lives when everything familiar has fallen away,” shares early reader Fred Smullin, an American Baptist pastor. “This novel does what the best literature has always done: it holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.”
“All of the perspectives are given appropriate weight, with outcomes that feel real and, where appropriate, tragic,” writes reader Andrew. “When the trees have burned and the ash has settled on the grave of a dead planet, what will the remnants of humanity do to meet the challenges of the question What Now?”
“Every decision carries immense emotional weight,” adds reader Ealkieran McCabin. “The moral dilemmas explored throughout the novel add remarkable depth, making the story about far more than survival alone.”
Where the Ashes Find Their Grave is available now in paperback and ebook through Chicken House Press, alannarusnak.ca, Indigo, Amazon, and anywhere good books are sold.
Watch the CHP website and Alanna's social channels for launch event details in the weeks ahead.
The world already ended. Now comes the harder part—figuring out what’s worth saving in what’s left.
Alanna Rusnak was born in the wrong decade and dreams of abandoning everything to live in a van and travel across Canada. She’ll call it “a book tour,” but it’s really an excuse to unleash her inner hippie.
A collector of typewriters and John Travolta VHS movies, she believes life is too short not to indulge in the things that bring you joy—which is exactly why she left a stuffy office job of eighteen years to launch a full-time indie press out of a chicken coop on her childhood property. It’s since been renovated into a beautiful workspace, where she writes fiction and runs both the press and the award-winning Canadian literary arts magazine Blank Spaces.
An author of literary and speculative fiction, Alanna likes to play in dark spaces, but always leaves room for redemption.
Her debut novel was a finalist for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and named one of the top reader-recommended titles of 2017 by cbcbooks.ca.
Settled in West Grey as a 4-year-old, it has always been her home and source of inspiration, and she’s working hard to build bridges between the various arts communities. She has no immediate plans to abandon it—but she’ll certainly leave it all behind the moment her husband gets on board with the van-life idea.
For media inquiries or to request a review copy, please contact Alanna Rusnak at Chicken House Press.
ISBN (print): 978-1997584223; ISBN (ebook): 978-1997584230
Rajiv Montgomery Noah spent his life building a sanctuary for the worthy. He chose two hundred souls, wrote them a constitution, and sealed the gates against everything that burned. On paper, it was beautiful.
But a house built on a cracked foundation will always find its fault line. Inside Eden, a man with a borrowed name carries old world appetites into the new one. The batteries are draining as the sun refuses to show her face—and the only man who can see her is trapped four hundred kilometres above the earth, utterly beyond reach. And beneath the surface of Rajiv’s perfect system lies a catastrophic secret—one he buried before the fires came—that may render everything he built, every sacrifice, every soul he saved, meaningless.
Beyond the dome, the silence may not be as total as they feared. But even the fragile hope of other survivors only sharpens the questions Rajiv can no longer avoid:
What does it mean to save humanity if you have already broken the thing that makes it human?
There is only one answer. And it will cost him everything.
Store owners and distributors are invited to register with Chicken House Press as a retailer to enjoy a wholesale discount on copies of the book.
