One of the goals of We Need Diverse Books™ is to enable underrepresented authors to tell their own stories.

Denise, the protagonist in my next book On the Edge of Gone, is not all me—but a lot about her is me, and a lot of her story is the kind that I don’t see being told. As a teenager, I found precisely zero autism narratives that I could see myself in. While there is far more choice now, there are still frightfully few books I’d feel comfortable handing to an autistic teenager going through the same things I’ve gone through. I wanted to change that. I wanted—needed—to see more girls like me. Autistic girls. Insecure girls. Troubled girls. Girls trying to untangle what they know, feel, and have been told about themselves.

Best of all, I wanted to see a girl like that smack-dab in the genre I’ve loved my whole life.

On the Edge of Gone is set in the final stages of a mass exodus as the world tries to flee from a destructive comet … which arrives within the first chapters. It’s part spaceship sci-fi, part contemporary character study, and part disaster novel.

It will release in March 2016, and I’m so very excited to share the gorgeous cover that my publisher Amulet Books/ABRAMS created.

January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one.

Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.

A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?

When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?

On the Edge of Gone will be available for pre-order at all the major retailers soon; in the meantime, add it on Goodreads or keep an eye on the book at my website.

A lifelong Amsterdammer, Corinne Duyvis spends her days writing speculative young adult and middle grade novels. She enjoys brutal martial arts and gets her geek on whenever possible. Otherbound, her YA fantasy debut, released from Amulet Books/ABRAMS in the summer of 2014. It received four starred reviews—Kirkus called it “original and compelling; a stunning debut,” while the Bulletin praised its “subtle, nuanced examinations of power dynamics and privilege.”

Find Corinne at her Twitter or Tumblr. She is a co-founder of Disability in Kidlit.