Extinctions
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A People Magazine Pick and winner of the Miles Franklin Book Award
Funny, poignant, and galvanizing by turns, Josephine Wilson’s award-winning novel explores many kinds of extinction—natural, racial, national, and personal—and what we might do to prevent them.
Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, has quarantined himself in a place he hates: a retirement village. His headstrong wife Martha, adored by all, is dead. His adopted daughter Caroline has cut ties, and his son Callum is lost to him in his own way. And though Frederick knows, logically, that a structural engineer can devise a bridge for any situation, somehow his own troubled family—fractured by years of secrets and lies—is always just out of his reach.
When a series of unfortunate incidents brings him and his spirited next-door neighbor Jan together, Frederick gets a chance to build something new in the life he has left. At the age of 69, he has to confront his most complex emotional relationships and the haunting questions he’s avoided all his life. Unbeknownst to him, Caroline—on her own journey of cultural reckoning—is doing the same. As father and daughter fight in their own ways to save what’s lost, they might finally find a way toward each other.
A masterful portrait of a man caught by history, and a sweeping meditation on the meaning of family, love, survival, and identity, Extinctions asks an urgent question: can we find the courage to change?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's American debut artfully portrays the nuances of death and extinction through its characters' reluctant self-examinations. Sixty-nine-year-old Frederick Lothian resents living in a retirement village near Melbourne, but his wife has died, and although his daughter, Caroline, lives nearby, she often travels to gather material for an exhibit of extinct animals. Frederick and Caroline are both submerged in regrets about their family's disconnections: Frederick ruing his past preoccupation with work; Caroline wondering about how she came to be adopted and the other family she has out there. Caroline is on a quest to shed light on the atrocities of human destruction on the animal kingdom (such as the American bison), while Frederick's own history as an engineer, professor, husband, and father provides grist for a disturbing journey of self-reflection, even as he tries to resist: "Why was he digging up what was done when he'd just have to go bury it again?" Frederick's introspection is shaken by Jan, another resident of St. Sylvan Village, who is as challenging as she is helpful. Unearthing the human need to feel connection to others, this contemplative novel skillfully delves into Frederick and Caroline's psyches, resulting in a potent depiction of loneliness and contact.)
