The novel is Roth's debut novel and was published a little over a year after Roth graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Creative Writing program at Northwestern University.[3] Roth wrote the novel during her senior year winter break[4] and sold movie rights to the novel before she had graduated.[3][5] She had been working on the series from Four's point of view but decided that he was not the character she wanted for her series. Years later, she decided to pick up the novel from a different point of view. Roth wrote the series from Beatrice's point of view.
The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago. Roth indicated that she did not originally intend to use Chicago as the setting:
I wrote the rough draft and I felt like it needed a more grounded sense of place, and I looked at the city I had described, which is all these trains constantly moving, and this lake marsh, and these rivers. And I realized that it was Chicago already, and it was just because that's the city I've known and loved the longest.[6]
