Dry

Dry is a young adult novel written by Neal Shusterman with Jarrod Shusterman, published in 2018. It takes the California drought, which the book calls the Tap-Out, several steps further than it has gone in life, to the moment when the water supply fails and everyone will remember where they were.

Before that point, life has become an endless list of don'ts: don't water the lawn, don't fill the pool, don't stay in the shower. Then the taps run dry for good. The same quiet suburbs turn on themselves, and Alyssa watches neighbours and families begin to compete for a supply that is not enough to go round.

Her parents go out to look for water and do not come back, and Alyssa is left with her younger brother and a set of choices that no one her age should have to make. The novel follows what the two of them do next, in a place where the ordinary rules have stopped applying. It is a survival story rather than a rescue story, and the two of them have only each other.