Description
One of “Fiction’s Buzziest Books,” Globe and Mail Fall Books Preview
20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read, Toronto Star Summer Books Preview
“Timely . . . a gripping page-turner” — Elle Canada
“Atmospheric and dramatic” — Toronto Star
For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush.
A terrifying hurricane tears up the east coast of North America. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of an isolated house on tiny Blaze Island. Milan Wells, a climate scientist whose career was destroyed by climate-change deniers, has fled to this remote island in the North Atlantic with his young daughter Miranda. Desperate to protect her from the world’s worsening weather, he embarks on creating an off-grid and self-sufficient island life. Seemingly safe in her father’s realm, Miranda walks the island’s rocky shores, keeps company with the youthful Caleb Borders and helps her father take his daily weather records. But the stranger’s arrival breaks open Miranda’s world, compelling her to wonder what her father is really up to with his mysterious weather experiments and series of elusive visitors. How, she wonders as her life transforms, will she create a future in a world more unpredictable than she has ever imagined?
Bush’s prose is a lightning storm in the dark of climate crisis, gothic, forceful and beautifully intimate. Here is the majesty and awe of unleashed nature and we are caught in the grip. Swept away. This novel is sublime. — Lisa Moore author of Caught and February.
Catherine Bush writes like she is our last storm watcher, and Blaze Island, her urgent panoramic of our fragile world. Every sentence has the lush exactitude of a poem, and the book, as it stuns and pivots, the stampeding heart of a thriller. — Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker and Stunt
Riveting and morally complex, Blaze Island is a beautiful, kaleidoscopic work that offers a resounding reply to the question of how literature might wrestle with the deepest threat facing the planet, anthropogenic climate change. — Kyo Maclear, author of Birds, Art, Life
Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island. A tale of greed, hope, and love, it is a beautifully written and challenging novel by one of Canada’s best writers. —Michael Redhill, Giller-Prize-winning author of Bellevue Square
