Author: Eicheldinger, Matthew
Adventure stories (Children's / Teenage)
Published on 23 April 2026 by Andrews McMeel Publishing in the United States as part of 'the When the Rain Came' series.
Paperback | 320 pages
203 x 140 | 472g
The rain never stops. The world is drowning. Survival is everything. When the Rain Came is the first YA book in an all-new, action-packed dystopian adventure series by New York Times bestselling author Matt Eicheldinger.
If we stay here, if we keep wandering without a real plan, we won't last. Maybe The Hill is dangerous. But maybe it's not. It's the only plan we have.�Seventeen-year-old Aurora knows how to survive. Life in the foster system has taught her how to stay quiet, stay smart, and stay ready. But nothing could prepare her for this: a never-ending storm that swallows cities, drowns forests, and turns the world into a flooded wasteland.
Trapped in a collapsing house with her strict prepper foster parents, Aurora is forced to live by their rules just to stay alive. Until the day they disappear without a trace.
Alone. Abandoned. And running out of time.
All Aurora has is a waterlogged scrap of paper and a name: The Hill.� With looters closing in and the floodwaters rising higher each day, she's left with one impossible choice”stay and wait for the storm to take her, or risk everything on a journey through the drowned remains of the world, to a find a place that may or not exist.
It's forward or nothing.
With echoes of Life As We Knew It, The Last of Us, and Hatchet, Aurora's story is a gripping, emotionally resonant survival story about resilience, found family, and one girl's fight to reclaim her future in a drowning world.