Fragile: A Novel
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5,0 • 1 Bewertung
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A man responsible for keeping New York City alive falls for an underground activist from the wrong side of the East River in this compelling fiction debut about love, loss, and resilience in the face of ecological crisis.
New York in 2057—a metropolis divided. Sheltered by enormous seawalls, Manhattan is green, clean, and thriving, but the eastern boroughs have been given up to the rising Atlantic. The planet has been ravaged by climate change, causing a global scarcity of pharmaceuticals, food, and other essentials for survival.
Shavir Tayard, barista and urban community farmer by day, rescuer of animals by night, is on a dog liberation raid in the coastal evacuation zone of Brooklyn when she sustains an injury that changes her relationship with the cute regular at her coffee shop—and her life.
Jake Alvaro is a troubled Homeland Security agent tasked with securing critical medical drugs for New York in a world running out of everything. His view of whose lives must be saved and who can be sacrificed is challenged when Shavir takes him across the East River to the people he was told to ignore. Soon, he begins to question the fragile truths he built his life upon.
Set in a divided near-future New York, FRAGILE tells a story of commitment and connection against all odds. When you find meaning in a world on the brink of collapse, do you risk everything for it?
"This striking fiction debut sets a character-rich story of connection and political awakening in a dystopian future New York where Manhattan and Brooklyn are behind seawalls and the Earth has been ravaged by climate change and resource scarcity."—BOOKLIFE
"An engrossing book that holds out hope despite all the mistakes made by humans."—KIRKUS REVIEWS
"A compelling near-future dystopia about climate collapse and helping the vulnerable survive"—INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW
"Alexa Weik von Mossner's debut novel is, by turns, thrilling, thoughtful, romantic, terrifying, and imaginative. Pick Fragile up at your own peril—I promise that you won't want to put it down." —KAREEM TAYYAR, Author of The Prince of Orange County
"Weik von Mossner's gripping novel hits the target on the most urgent problems of scale that come with climate change. Fragile takes climate fiction to a new level: a fast-paced, suspenseful must-read for anyone interested in our planet's future." —URSULA K. HEISE, Author of Imagining Extinction
"Fragile is a scarily topical tale of what soon may come to be in our fast-changing world. And it's also a moving love story between two people from opposite sides of the track, both trying desperately to save the world they love. I read it with huge enjoyment.—SUSANNAH WATERS, Author of Cold Comfort
Kundenrezensionen
Fragile
The setting of Fragile is the heat-stricken New York City of a not-too-distant future. Shavir and Jake are at the center of this cli-fi novel. Weik von Mossner's writing is almost cinematic; she manages to develop characters and scenes vividly with just a few words.
Shavir is part of an eco-group that grows its own vegetables to avoid having to rely on industrially produced food and frees dogs from illegal fattening farms. Jake works for a government agency that tries to maintain New York's supply of medicines and other supplies. This is becoming increasingly difficult as global supply chains become more fragile in the face of superstorms, flooding and other effects of climate catastrophe. Antibiotics that Jake can organize for Manhattan are missing in Brooklyn, and what he can organize for New York is missing in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. The worse the situation gets, the more someone earns from it.
Shavir and Jake, these two representatives of very different reactions to the climate crisis - local / global, counterculture / state authority - become a couple. Of course, the love story is a little predictable. But Weik von Mossner succeeds in turning it into a stage for questions that arise in a world in which vital goods are becoming increasingly scarce. To whom is one loyal then: to one’s own neighborhood and to an authority that ultimately proves to be the instrument of the rich - or to the entire city? To one’s personal environment or to all people in need? Only to people or also to animals? The novel shows how difficult it is to answer these questions when they become concrete, when the need increases, when the conflicts become ever more violent and ever closer, when you are in the middle of them ...
Weik von Mossner's writing is exciting, precise and unpretentious, full of feeling for her characters, but without false sentimentality. In the relatively few pages of her novel, she gives us a glimpse of a world that could be just around the corner unless we manage to contain the climate catastrophe. - Although the dogs as fattening cattle are not convincing, the end of the novel leaves us wanting more. That's why Fragile gets five stars.