Briefly Very Beautiful
A Novel
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Instantly immersive, beautifully imagined, this is an unflinching but inspiring story about some things we’re going to lose, and other things we must never lose.” —Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series
Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful is a spellbinding dystopian novel about the lengths one will go to for their children in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse.
In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war.
His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children; while it’s a frightening time, there is also a surprising, quiet tenderness in living on the edge of societal collapse.
When things start to feel more dangerous in the city, Cass evacuates with the children to her mother-in-law’s house deep in the countryside. Initially, it’s a place of safety, but her mother-in-law’s erratic behavior and increasing grip over the children worries Cass, and so they flee again to a commune on the coast. It’s an idyllic place, but Cass comes to suspect this seemingly harmonious community has a dark underbelly.
Briefly Very Beautiful is a magnetic novel about love and resilience. Against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, it is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal.
Roz Dineen’s lush prose combines with epic and precise world-building to create a society that feels at once unrecognizable but deeply, chillingly familiar. The result is a compelling portrait of what it is to parent through apocalypse.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Dineen's exciting and unsettling dystopian debut, a mother strives to protect her children amid climate devastation and political violence. The story takes place in an unnamed English-speaking city, where Cass raises her 10-month-old daughter Daisy and two young stepchildren while her doctor husband, Nathaniel, works abroad in a war zone. The city is terrorized by a group of male climate activists who ironically call themselves Gaia, and when they start murdering people at random in their twisted bid to save the planet, Cass makes her escape. Her controlling mother-in-law, Eden, convinces her and the children to settle with Eden's family in a "special small" utopia called Eigleath. There, Nathaniel's brother Arthur introduces Cass to a group of people who blame capitalism and monogamy for the planet's woes and believe Earth can be healed only by "connect humankind back to the religion of the Great Mothers." Then their idealistic community collapses and its members find themselves ruled by a drug cartel. Not all of the plot points are fully developed, but Dineen delivers plenty of bracing details of extreme heat and water shortages, making her portrait of Cass's dedication to her family all the more wrenching. Readers will be eager to see what Dineen does next.
