Twenty-four-year-old Max Mason thought his life was mundane, until a nondescript package arrived at his door containing a book titled "The Tragic Life of Max Mason." It read like a cruel prank—a detailed biography chronicling his descent from mediocrity into absolute ruin, featuring bankruptcy, a sham marriage to a woman carrying another man's child, and a lonely death from cancer.

Lucas thought he had hit the jackpot. Waking up in his high school classroom ten years in the past, he was ready to use his future knowledge to dominate the stock market and retire young. But the world he returned to was not the one he left behind.

It began with a hangover and ended with an apocalypse. Liam Schultz awoke to a splitting headache and a soaked carpet, assuming a burst pipe was the worst of his worries. But when he pulled back the curtains of his thirtieth-floor apartment, the world he knew was gone. The skyscrapers, the streets, and the noise of the city had vanished, replaced by an endless, silent ocean. The water had risen overnight, stopping exactly at his floor, leaving him stranded on the last dry island in a drowned world.