Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende’s first YA novel takes place in the depths of the Amazon Rainforest. Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold joins his grandmother on the trip of a lifetime to the remote wilds of South America. But while exploring the jungle, Alexander overhears the plot of a greedy entrepreneur. Soon, he is dragged into an adventure, led by a mysterious spirit guide.
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“Life is something we need to stop correcting…Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing. Every belief will be outgrown, in time.”
In the Booker-shortlisted follow-up to The Overstory, Power’s narrator Theo Byrne is a university astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. But he is also mourning the death of his environmental-activist wife and caring for Robin, their neurodivergent nine-year-old. Robin is funny, loving and intensely engaged in the natural world. But he becomes increasingly disturbed, and after a violent outburst at school, the strength of the father-son bond will be tested to its limits. What can a father do, when those around him refuse to understand his rare and troubled child? And how can he reveal to his boy the truth about our bewildered world?
‘Powers has the rare gift of being able to deal with big ideas while keeping you interested in the lives and emotions of his characters.’ – Sebastian Faulks
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Clade is the story of one family in a radically changing world, a place of loss and wonder where the extraordinary mingles with the everyday. Haunting, lyrical and unexpectedly hopeful, it is the work of a writer in command of the major themes of our time. The distinguished nature writer Robert Macfarlane calls it “a brilliant, unsettling and timely novel: a true text of the Anthropocene in its subtle shuttlings between lives, epochs and eras, and its knitting together of the planet’s places. Like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, its great subjects are deep time, swift change, and the eeriness of everyday life. Reading Clade leaves us, in Timothy Morton’s phrase, “strange strangers” to ourselves; and makes the Earth seem an odder, older, more vulnerable home.”
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Perched on a hill above a village by the sea, the high house has a mill, a vegetable garden and a barn full of supplies. Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive there one day to find it cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally. Not quite a family, they learn to live together, and care for one another. But there are limits even to what the ailing Grandy knows about how to survive, and, if the storm comes, it might not be enough.
“uses a future post-apocalyptic world as a perspective from which to apply the melancholic, nostalgic air of Ian Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein or W G Sebald to our own present. You think you have time. And then, all at once, you don’t’ – The Irish Times
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Ea has always felt like an outsider. She suffers from a type of deafness that means she cannot master the spinning rituals that unite her pod of spinner dolphins. When tragedy strikes her family and Ea feels she is partly to blame, she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave. As Ea ventures into the vast, she discovers dangers everywhere, from lurking predators to strange objects floating in the water. But just as she is coming to terms with her solitude, a chance encounter with a group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably alter the course of her life. In her terrifying, propulsive novel, Laline Paull explores the true meaning of family, belonging, sacrifice – the harmony and tragedy of the pod – within an ocean that is no longer the sanctuary it once was, and which reflects a world all too recognisable to our own.
‘Laline Paull succeeds splendidly in rising to the most important literary challenge of our time – restoring voice and agency to other-than-human beings’ – Amitav Ghosh. Shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize for Fiction 2023.
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