Blaze Island

Hamilton Reads Selection 2021, Globe100: a 2020 Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year, a Writers’ Trust Best Books of the Year Selection, a 49th Shelf Books of the Year Selection

For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush

A mammoth Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake. On tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic, Miranda Wells, teenaged daughter of climate scientist turned weather-watcher Alan Wells, finds herself in an altered world, as does Caleb Borders, the young man from the island who works for her father. Who is the youthful stranger who crashes his car in the midst of the storm and seeks refuge in Miranda’s isolated home? Who are the three men who, hours before the storm erupts, have flown to the island in a sleek corporate jet only to be stranded there? 

While Miranda contends with the astonishing secrets that the youthful stranger reveals to her, Caleb grapples with alarming discoveries of his own. Both Caleb and Miranda are compelled to wonder: Is her father a man capable of working on a contentious climate engineering project that would attempt, despite huge risks, to cool the world’s warming weather by shooting particulates high into the atmosphere?

In Blaze Island acclaimed writer Catherine Bush enfolds a gripping human story within a landscape of ever-shifting elements. It asks how far a parent will go to create a safe world for a child, and what the children of today will need to do in order to imagine a future for themselves while navigating a world that looks less familiar by the moment.

“Timely . . . a gripping page-turner.” — Elle Canada

“Bush’s deeply resonant ecological retelling of The Tempest showcases a “brave new world” as ironic as Shakespeare’s: brave because it is startling, dangerous and inescapable for those left alive; new because it really isn’t, merely the whirlwind humanity has sowed for its children to reap.” — Maclean’s

“A page-turner that confers a moral imperative of our time.” — Kerri Sakamoto for the Writers’ Trust of Canada

“Reminiscent of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News with a slight magic realism take on Newfoundland, and a tinge of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, set in a post-Tribulation Labrador.” — The Telegram

“Atmospheric and dramatic, Blaze Island . . . introduces food for thought about apt responses to our predicament and what sacrifices might need to be made to stabilize the natural world.” — Toronto Star

“The novel acts as an alarm bell for the ways the rapidly changing climate will set back the world as we know it. Tensions … fuel the narrative, much like a storm that keeps building before it becomes a tempest.” — Quill & Quire

“An elegantly crafted story that also proves to be a sizzling ecological thriller.” — Postmedia

Catherine Bush writes like she is our last storm watcher, and Blaze Island, her urgent panoramic of our fragile world. Every sentence has the lush exactitude of a poem, and the book, as it stuns and pivots, the stampeding heart of a thriller. — Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker and Stunt

Bush’s prose is a lightning storm in the dark of climate crisis, gothic, forceful and beautifully intimate. Here is the majesty and awe of unleashed nature and we are caught in the grip. Swept away. This novel is sublime. — Lisa Moore, author of Caught and February

Riveting and morally complex, Blaze Island is a beautiful, kaleidoscopic work that offers a resounding reply to the question of  how literature might wrestle with the deepest threat facing the  planet, anthropogenic climate change. — Kyo Maclear, author of Birds, Art, Life