Tag Archive for: fiction

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Arboreality | Rebecca Campbell

 

Campbell’s brilliant cli-fi novella weaves an intergenerational story of human resilience against the backdrop of ongoing ecological collapse. Rooted in the dire consequences of unchecked colonial capitalism, the story juxtaposes grief and loss alongside survival and regeneration. A professor rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell’s astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this interconnected story of how a west coast community survives the ravages of climate change.

A gentle and thought-provoking narrative that lingers long after the last page.

The Antidote | Karen Russell

 

Despite its historical setting – the Dust Bowl of the 1930s – Karen Russell’s engrossing, hallucinatory drama of a Nebraska town in the throes of ecological breakdown feels achingly timely. At its heart is the question of memory and its suppression: of injustices that are deliberately forgotten only to rise again, of false memories handed solemnly down through generations, and of the vertiginous cost of allowing one view of history to prevail. Told from the point of view of a mystical “Prairie Witch” and her teenage acolyte, a repressed and lonely farmer, and a Black photographer tasked with documenting what remains of rural life, the story charts one small community’s battle to survive in a landscape it has destroyed, and with its own unstoppable demons.

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Earth 7 | Deb Olin Unferth

 

“Earth had gotten the best the universe had to offer, in all categories, and the achievement had nearly killed her.” Enter Unferth’s teenage protagonist Dylan Stein. Most of America has been reduced to a desert wasteland, yet Dylan longs to leave her home community of Sea Garden, a “luxury pod” on the ocean floor. Finally, at the “fully terraformed resort” of Vacationland, she meets and falls in love with Melanie–a girl so engineered that she can pass as a robot–and together they decide to create a genetic database as an “Earth backup” from which to rebuild the Earth. While Unferth writes elegiacally about humankind’s death drive, the wild energy of her comedy transcends the grief of humankind’s predicament, and raises a thousand smiles. And boy, do we need them.

Uprising | Tahmima Anam

 

A rebellion ignites amongst a community of sex workers on an isolated island in this fiercely moving novel – inspired by the real women of Banishanta, Bangladesh. Set on a desolate, sinking island, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude. Bought and sold by Amma, the sadistic madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have learned to accept their fate. Yet their children weave fantastic tales of escape, imagining that someday they will leave the island and enjoy a life of freedom.

When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is forcibly brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the collective complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island, their world and the very order of things.

An earth-shattering drama of resistance and female power, Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.

Finalist in the Orwell Prize For Political Fiction, 2026.

Meat | Joseph D’Lacey

 

Scratch the surface of the ordinary-looking community of Abyrne, and there’s deceit and depravity galore. Juxtaposing the banality of everyday life with the macabre in a town dominated by the twin forces of a sinister religious sect and a meat processing industry, d’Lacey conjures a wild, subversive story that probes the darkest corners of the human psyche. For lovers of horror fiction, it’s a gorily thrilling tale of predators, prey, religious gaslighting, and dirty money.

The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck

 

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s powerful tale of  greed, corruption and the consequences of intensive farming is a stark reminder that man-made environmental disasters are far from new. The story tells how the beleaguered Joad family, forced to join the great wave of migrants leaving the poverty of Oklahoma’s ruined Dust Bowl, travels in search of the green orchards of California, with its “golden oranges hanging from the trees”. But there’s trouble in paradise…