THE ISLAND OF LAST THINGS

In the not-too-distant future, two women working at the world’s last zoo form an electric bond as they work to save its endangered occupants.

Located on Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, in a world that’s rapidly falling apart due to irreversible climate change and a frighteningly believable fast-acting disease that killed untold numbers of animals and birds, is the world’s last remaining zoo. Lauded by the general public, ridiculed by resistance groups, and targeted by animal trafficking cartels, the zoo is home to birds of prey, jungle cats, farm animals, and an incredibly rare and important elephant named Titan. It’s also where Camille Parker—a rather unremarkable young woman who’s learned to keep her head down and prefers the company of animals to humans—both lives and works. Camille’s quiet, uneventful, animal-filled day-to-day schedule is upended when Sailor Anderson, an enigmatic zookeeper from Paris, arrives looking for work. Sailor is the opposite of Camille in every way, and while she’s familiar with the dangers that the outside world holds for the zoo and its occupants—animal or otherwise—she quickly butts up against the rigid rules of the place. The more time the women spend together, the more Camille finds herself drawn to Sailor. When word reaches them of a secret sanctuary that could provide freedom and safety for some of the zoo’s most prized animals, Camille must choose between the life she knows or take a risk on Sailor and the unknown that the outside world holds in store for them. Told in chapters that alternate points of view between the present as told by Camille and the past as told by Sailor, this novel is a moving and elegiac cautionary tale about the state of the world, and the beauty that we so often take for granted.

An all-too-plausible look at what the future might hold for the natural world and the people who strive to protect it.