Above the Ether (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781628729986)

"Chillingly recognizable . . . In twenty years--or less--people will have a hard time believing that this is a work of the imagination. That's how convincingly Barnes plays out the signs and omens of our times." --Tim Johnston, New York Times-bestselling author

Here is a mesmerizing novel of unfolding dystopia amid the effects of climate change in a world very like our own, for readers of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.

In this prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change.

A father and his young children fleeing a tsunami after a massive earthquake in the Gulf. A woman and her husband punishing themselves without relent for the loss of both their sons to addiction, while wildfires slowly burn closer to their family home. A brilliant investor, assessing opportunity in the risk to crops, homes, cities, industries, and infrastructure, working in the silent comfort of her office sixty floors up in the scorching air. A doctor and his wife stuck in a refugee camp for immigrants somewhere in a southern desert. Two young men working the rides for a roadside carnival, one escaping a brutal past, the other a racist present. The manager of a chain of nondescript fast-food restaurants in a city ravaged by the relentless wind.

While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken--a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails--until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm.

Author: Eric Barnes
ISBN-10: 1628729988
ISBN-13: 9781628729986
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Language: English
Published: 06/11/2019
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 05/15/2019 pg. 27