A quirky, bold, and endearing masterpiece of climate fiction.
Love, loss, and lingering at the end of the world.
“In those years, the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds, shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight. The population of Earth had been falling for decades, and the drop did not have a sole cause.” Unferth’s latest begins with a scientist named Rosemary Stein who’s taking her 5-year-old daughter to live under the sea in a settlement of acrylic pods. Rosemary is definitely not a people person—maybe she’s on the spectrum—and she’s named her daughter XY. “What kind of bonkers name is that?” the kid would like to know. “People call me Dylan.” Beyond miserable in her lonely childhood, Dylan eventually makes an online friend, Zee, who lives on Mars, “a descendant of one of the original Mars settlements,” which turns out to be just one of the ways humans have fled their incinerated planet. (Some people have encoded themselves on microchips, for example.) As Dylan schemes to have Zee rescue her from her apocalyptically boring life, Unferth’s prodigious worldbuilding unfolds magically to offer other possibilities. We next find Dylan at the molecular collections lab in the desert where she was born, her mother’s employer, where she serves an extended internship as a groundskeeper. Then on a company-sponsored break at Vacationland for Singles, “an all-inclusive, fully terraformed resort,” where she falls head over heels for the beautiful Melanie, whom the other guests believe to be a robot but is actually a human who spent seven seasons on a body-modification reality show called Celebrity Plastics where she may have accidentally been given eternal life. And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Dylan and Melanie’s story—and Zee’s, because he’s still out there somewhere, and Rosemary’s, too—unfold over vast vistas of time and space, profound, funny, alarming, and imbued with love and sorrow for our lost world.
A quirky, bold, and endearing masterpiece of climate fiction.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781644453940
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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