Fauna
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature?
A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her.
Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.
Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.
"Vadnais’s exciting debut immerses the reader into the dreamy and menacing near-future world of Shivering Heights, a flooded wilderness in the twilight of the human race.... The sumptuous imagery and limpid atmosphere forms a dizzying picture of a world after human existence. This dark, sensual novel invites the reader to imagine nature thriving in the toxic aftermath of human domination, and makes for an essential addition to the recent crop of eco-fiction." —Publishers Weekly
“A spirited vision of the end times that reminds us that a new one will be born out of the old, as savage and alive as the previous one’s primitive beginnings.” —La Presse
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vadnais's exciting debut immerses the reader into the dreamy and menacing near-future world of Shivering Heights, a flooded wilderness in the twilight of the human race. A biologist, Laura, studies the deaths of animals living along a polluted river and becomes obsessed with the new forms of life she encounters. In these scenes, Vadnais offers the reader dazzling glimpses of newly evolved, semihuman and hybrid species, the result of a pervasive parasite that's slowly infecting all forms of life, forcing them to either evolve or die. The postapocalyptic tableaux include a flooded spa town haunted by an impish siren and a floating town "cobbled together from old barges and sailboats" whose inhabitants have forgotten life on dry land. As the Earth becomes more and more uninhabitable, the surviving humans, if they can still be called human, grow new appendages, scales, and feathers, and some morph into other creatures including a shark and a polar bear. The sumptuous imagery and limpid atmosphere forms a dizzying picture of a world after human existence. This dark, sensual novel invites the reader to imagine nature thriving in the toxic aftermath of human domination, and makes for an essential addition to the recent crop of eco-fiction.
