Description
Book SynopsisA Globe and Mail Top 100 Selection
Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection
A Writers' Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year
A 49th Shelf Books of the Year (Fiction) Selection
One of "20 books you need to read this winter," Maclean's
For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush.
The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of the isolated house where Milan Wells lives with his daughter Miranda.
A climate scientist whose career was destroyed by climate change deniers, Wells has fled to this remote island with his daughter years before, desperate to protect her from the world's worsening weather.
Seemingly safe in her father's realm, Miranda walks the island's rocky shores, helping her father with his daily weather records. But the stranger's arrival breaks open Miranda's world, stirs up memories of events of long ago and compels her to wonder what her father is up to with his mysterious weather experiments. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly that she hardly knows what has happened or what the unpredictable future will bring.
Trade Review"
Blaze Island is a fascinating and prescient story. With climate change as the backdrop, Catherine Bush’s lyrical portrait of the northern island landscape and a young woman’s passion for the land offers a frightening warning of how big business will surely adapt to the changes to benefit itself. Bush’s story is compelling — we watch the hurricane unfold, as only a brilliant writer can show us — and offers a moving and soulful primer for climate survival. " -- Shani Mootoo, author of
Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab"Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel,
Blaze Island — an ever-moving storm of emotion and politics that unfolds under churning skies and life-or-death stakes. Bush brings together a complicated cast of three-dimensional men and women, all fighting with and against each other in the name of saving the planet ... or making a buck." -- Michael Redhill, Giller Prize winning author of
Bellevue Square"
Blaze Island is a beautiful, far-seeing, and fiercely intelligent novel about the most critical question of our time. 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"In the famous end of The Tempest, Prospero asks that the audience free him and the other characters from the dream of the play.
Blaze Island amounts to a similar request. To deny or ignore our changing world is to stay willfully dreaming." -- Andrew Hood *
Bookshelf *
"[Bush] creates characters who are grappling with issues that extend beyond their domestic lives, encompassing broader public threats or concerns. In
Blaze Island, she lays out a very real and present dilemma that each character confronts differently." -- Allie Turner *
NUVO Magazine *
"Bush’s deeply resonant ecological retelling of
The Tempest showcases a "brave new world" as ironic as Shakespeare’s: brave because it is startling, dangerous and inescapable for those left alive; new because it really isn’t, merely the whirlwind humanity has sowed for its children to reap." -- Brian Bethune *
Maclean's *
"
Blaze Island is a perfect combination of a character-driven narrative and a strong underlying plot. ... it fizzles and pops, releasing bubbles of information slowly over time." -- Olivia Robinson *
Journal of Newfoundland Studies *
"
Blaze Island is a timely, clever, deftly plotted, and deeply moving eco-thriller that cautions its reader against a technoescapist fix to ecocidal warming." -- Emily Arvay *
Canadian Literature *
