Join us for our Climate Fiction Book Club, a monthly book club that will read and discuss fiction to explore imagined futures of the climate crisis. Here are some of the upcoming titles we'll discuss, the dates we'll meet, and other books at ICPL for further reading.
The light pirate
Brooks-Dalton, Lily, 1987- author.
FICTION Brooks-Dalton, Lily
"From the author of Good Morning, Midnight comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman's lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world. Florida as we know it is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker for the local utility municipality, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before. As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature. Told in four parts-power, water, light, and time-The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness"--
The deluge
Markley, Stephen, author.
FICTION Markley, Stephen
In 2013 California, environmental scientist Tony Pietrus, after receiving a death threat, is linked to a colorful cast of characters, including a brazen young activist who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
Join us for a discussion on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 - 6:30pm to 7:30pm in Meeting Room D
- Anne M
Dry
Shusterman, Neal, author.
YOUNG ADULT FICTION Shusterman, Neal
A lengthy California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, turning Alyssa's quiet suburban street into a warzone, and she is forced to make impossible choices if she and her brother are to survive.
Join us for a discussion on Wednesday, May 14, 2025 - 6:30pm to 7:30pm in Meeting Room D.
- Anne M
Flight behavior : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara.
FICTION Kingsolv Barbara
Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver's riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.
Published over a decade ago, Kingsolver's novel about a perceived miracle that actually means disruption in multiple layers.
- Anne M
The future : a novel
Alderman, Naomi, author.
FICTION Alderman Naomi
"The bestselling, award-winning author of The Power delivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. When Martha Einkorn fled her father's isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she's surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father's fox and rabbit sermon--once a parable to her--are starting to come true, how much future is actually left? Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She's cornered, desperate and--worst of all--might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future? Martha and Zhen's worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha's relentless drive and Zhen's insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization. By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here."--provided by publisher.
Alderman's dystopian novel weaves in techno-oligarchy, global pandemics, and social media.
- Anne M
Parable of the sower
Butler, Octavia E.
SCIENCE FICTION Butler, Octavia E.
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
Published over 30 years ago, Butler's imagined 2020's shows a world facing climate change and social inequality.
- Anne M
The great transition : a novel
Fuller Googins, Nick, author.
FICTION Fullergo Nick
Emi Vargas, whose parents helped save the world, is tired of being told how lucky she is to have been born after the climate crisis. But following the public assassination of a dozen climate criminals, Emi’s mother, Kristina, disappears as a possible suspect, and Emi’s illusions of utopia are shattered. A determined Emi and her father, Larch, journey from their home in Nuuk, Greenland to New York City, now a lightly populated storm-surge outpost built from the ruins of the former metropolis. But they aren’t the only ones looking for Kristina. Thirty years earlier, Larch first came to New York with a team of volunteers to save the city from rising waters and torrential storms. Kristina was on the frontlines of a different battle, fighting massive wildfires that ravaged the western United States. They became part of a movement that changed the world—The Great Transition—forging a new society and finding each other in process. Alternating between Emi’s desperate search for her mother and a meticulously rendered, heart-stopping account of her parents’ experiences during The Great Transition, this novel beautifully shows how our actions today determine our fate tomorrow. A triumphant debut, The Great Transition is “a book for the present and the future—read this and you will be changed” (Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author).
Explore more imagined futures with Nick Fuller Googins' as we see humanity figure it out--not easily--and what toll it takes to get there.
- Anne M
The inland sea : a novel
Watts, Madeleine, author.
FICTION Watts Madelein
"After her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. The work itself becomes monotonous. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, having an affair with an ex-lover. Interwoven with the woman's self-destructive unraveling is the story of how, two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather--the British explorer John Oxley--traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. With a life unraveling and the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, this book is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, it asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency"--From book cover flap.
Kirkus calls this novel "magnificently uncomfortable."
- Anne M
All the water in the world : a novel
Caffall, Eiren, author.
FICTION Caffall Eiren
"In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York's Museum of Natural History in a flooded future. All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city's flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved. Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story-with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most - love and work, community and knowledge - will survive"--
One of the latest entries in climate fiction, Caffall's future may have recognizable landmarks made completely unrecognizable.
- Anne M
The unworthy : a novel
Bazterrica, Agustina María, 1974- author.
FICTION Bazterri Agustina
"From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find--discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe--cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe. But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past--and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can't she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?" --
Bazterrica writes unsettling (perhaps better described as disturbing) fictional futures. Her latest book translated into English fits this bill.
- Anne M
The immortal King Rao : a novel
Vara, Vauhini, 1982- author.
FICTION Vara Vauhini
"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao--literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena's future is now in the hands of its Shareholders--unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands. Lyrical, satirical, and profound, The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone--peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers--ever get free?"--
Vara's techno-dystopia was championed in reviews.
- Anne M
Join us for a discussion on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 6:30pm to 7:30pm in Meeting Room D.
- Anne M