After the Fall: Catherine's Tale Books in Order

The After the Fall: Catherine's Tale books sit beside the main After the Fall series, but they change the angle in an important way. Instead of following Jason as the primary lead, these two books lean harder into Catherine's point of view and what it means to grow up after the world has already broken. The setting is the same post-EMP America, where power is gone, systems have failed, and small pockets of people are trying to build something livable in the wreckage.

Catherine lives with her family in a secluded mountain valley that has become a refuge after the collapse. In theory, life there should be getting steadier. Crops can be grown, routines can return, and trade with the nearby town of Hillsboro might offer a path back toward ordinary life. In practice, Hillsboro is corrupted by a gangster regime, and that hope of normalcy turns into the main pressure point of the series.

That is where Catherine changes.

In Catherine's Tale, Part 1, she is pulled into the dangerous politics between the valley and the town, even when Jason would rather shield her from it. The story keeps its eye on family, fear, and the uneasy feeling that bad men now hold the levers that used to belong to law and civic order. Catherine is not just standing on the edge of events. She is learning, fast, that survival may demand nerve, judgment, and violence.

By Catherine's Tale, Part 2, the conflict turns more openly brutal. The rulers of Hillsboro want the valley crushed because it represents an alternative they cannot control. Catherine has to rely on raw allies, protect the people she loves, and step into a more dangerous version of herself. The books still have action, shootouts, and threats from outside, but the ongoing arc is really about a young woman being forced out of whatever childhood remained.

These books are also interesting because of where they sit in Nees's larger body of work. He later reworked the two Catherine books into Uprising, a tighter sequel that brought Jason back to the front of the story. That means Catherine's Tale has a kind of parallel life now. It is both a connected branch of After the Fall and an earlier, more Catherine-centered take on the fight over Hillsboro.

So what should you expect here? A post-apocalyptic story that stays close to family, valley life, and local power struggles, rather than jumping straight to national spectacle. The tone is tense, grounded, and personal. If you like stories about rebuilding after collapse, but also want to see how that rebuilding looks through the eyes of a younger character who has to harden quickly, Catherine's books offer a useful and distinctive side path through this world.