Stillicide
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage that is "close to perfect," "imaginative and far reaching," and "very human and deadly serious" (The Guardian).
Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage.
As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.
From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Welsh writer Jones's haunting and lucidly written latest (after The Long Dry) is set in a bleak future where water is so precious that a Yorkshire city has fashioned an "ice dock" to trap an iceberg it has dragged down from the Arctic. The archaic word stillicide, an apt title for the book, is defined as both a constant dripping and a law designating the dispersal of water from the wealthy to the "servient." This latter meaning mirrors the novel's plot, with cities controlling meager water supply and rural areas struggling to survive as they lose residents. The story receives unique resonance from its multiple perspectives, among them a conflicted soldier named John Branner, who works tirelessly to protect the ice dock from activists bent on sabotage; retired engineer David, who left the chaos of the city with his family to observe the devastation; and a character called "the professor," who studies the protests and the ice dock, as well as native fauna (a thriving dragonfly, which could affect government plans, surprises and excites him). Terse, often poetic sentences surrounded by white space develop a rhythm, suggesting both an inevitability and a resignation. Jones's visionary tale is a singular, brilliantly crafted addition to the climate fiction genre.
