Welcome to another set of Cli- Fi Friday recommended reads, we hope you enjoyed our last recommendations. This week we thought you might enjoy some more fiction titles.
Title : The Wall
Author : John Lanchester
Synopsis: Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he’s lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights.
The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else.
He will soon find out what Defenders do and who the Others are. Along with the rest of his squad, he will endure cold and fear day after day, night after night. But somewhere, in the dark cave of his mind, he thinks: wouldn’t it be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if you had to fight for your life?
John Lanchester’s thrilling, hypnotic new novel is about why the young are right to hate the old. It’s about a broken world you will recognise as your own-and about what might be found when all is lost.
If you’d like to read this book you can place a hold on a copy for pickup in any of our libraries by requesting it here. Alternatively you can download the ebook here.
Title : Oil on Water
Author : Helon Habila
Synopsis: From the desks of Nigeria’s newsrooms, two journalists are recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil engineer. Zaq, an infamous media hack, knows what’s in store, but Rufus, a keen young journalist eager to get himself noticed, has no idea what he’s let himself in for. Journeying into the oil-rich regions of the Niger Delta, where militants rule and the currency dealt in is the lives of hostages, Rufus soon finds himself acting as intermediary between editor, husband, captive and soldier.
As they follow the trail of the missing woman, love for the ‘story’ becomes about much more than just uncovering her whereabouts, and instead becomes a mission to make sense of their own muddled lives.
In a cruel twist of fate, Rufus finds himself taking on Zaq’s role much more literally than he ever anticipated, and as the body count rises, and the environment burns, he learns that truth can often be a bitter pill to swallow.
If you’d like to read this book you can place a hold on a copy for pickup in any of our libraries by requesting it here .
Title : Tentacle
Author : Rita Indiana
Synopsis:
Tells the tale of a young trans-man’s fantastical journey. With the help of a magical anemone, he travels back in time and witnesses how colonialism and an over-reliance on technology have led to the destruction of oceans—and of humanity. He seeks to change the arc of history before it’s too late.This sinister novel, set in the Caribbean during a time of environmental collapse sparked by three ecological disasters, reflects on the region’s colonial history as it portrays an era of capitalism run amok. It was originally published in Spanish under the title La mucama de Omicunlé.
If you’d like to read this book you can place a hold on a copy for pickup in any of our libraries by requesting it here .
Title : On Time and Water
Author : Andri Snær Magnason
Synopsis: A few years ago, Andri Snaer Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, was asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced. Magnason demurred: he wasn’t a specialist, he said; it wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change―and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for an iceberg to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally-minded: a travel story, a world history, and a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations. Already a massive bestseller in Iceland, and selling in two dozen territories around the world, this is a book unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
If you’d like to read this book you can place a hold on a copy for pickup in any of our libraries by requesting it here.
Title : The High House
Author :Jessie Greengrass
Synopsis: Self-sufficiency is made possible by a barn thoughtfully stocked by the scientist mother of one of the characters with the tools of a past civilisation – trainers, and tinned foods. Greengrass describes her novel as “a sort of prequel” to Russell Hoban’s great dystopian fantasy Riddley Walker, where – in the absence of writing materials – language has degraded and mutated. Her East Anglia, like Alam’s Long Island, is on the way to becoming a dystopia, without actually yet being one. The characters of both novels are trapped between the “before” and the “after”, in precisely the sort of limbo that makes the environmental breakdown so hard to write about. It invokes the story of Noah’s Ark, creating sealed-off family communities while implicitly asking what such survival could mean in a world without olive trees, or doves.
If you’d like to read this book you can place a hold on a copy for pickup in any of our libraries by requesting it here.
Join us next week for another list of recommended Cli-Fi reads.
Kildare Library Service 