![]() ![]() Secrets and trauma ripple down the generations in one African American family whose women are united by resilience. None emerge unscathed from impending natural disasters: wildfires nix a wedding, flooding means a mother-to-be must go into labour alone, and record-smashing temperatures kill off an entomologist’s subjects. ![]() ![]() A mordant eco-thriller, it centres on the members of one extended family, including a would-be influencer and a climate doomer. TC Boyle, who lives in California, has drawn zany satire from looming environmental catastrophe in previous works, but there’s no denying that enhanced plausibility adds fresh layers of absurdism and melancholy to his latest novel. The resulting biblio-memoir is acute and tender, its pages alive with debate, discovery and desire. ![]() Edging onwards through the loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s, depression and a move from London to New York, she turned for guidance to nine unconventional authors whom she loved in her youth, among them George Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison. It granted her the freedom she’d sought and yet, untethered from conformity, she felt increasingly perplexed as she tried to envisage how the rest of her life might look. Feminist critic Joanna Biggs was 34 when her marriage fell apart. ![]()
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