Blaze Island
Globe100: one of the Globe & Mail‘s Best Books of the Year for 2020
A Writers’ Trust Best Books of the Year Selection
A 49th Shelf Books of the Year Selection
One of the “20 Books You Need to Read This Winter,” Maclean’s
One of “Fiction’s Buzziest Books,” the Globe & Mail’s Fall Book Preview
“20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read” this summer, Toronto Star
For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush
“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
For more media on Blaze Island, please go to my Media page.
The Blaze Island Book Trailer can be found here.
Blaze Island is a beautiful, far-seeing, and fiercely intelligent novel about the most critical question of our time––the weather systems that threaten to collapse us both from outside and from within. 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
Catherine Bush’s cast of characters roam Blaze Island after a storm of mythical strength, amid a welter of blown off roofs, smashed windows, sunken vehicles, blazing desire and destruction. 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. In the absence of saviours and easy consolation, what Bush has created is an allegory of hubris and humility and an exhilarating space in which to re-imagine multi-species relationships and stories. — Kyo Maclear, author of Birds, Art, Life
Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island. Set on an island off the coast of Newfoundland, its cast of characters includes a renegade climate scientist and his young daughter Miranda. They are self-made castaways who can’t get far enough away from what’s chasing them: memories of loss, threats of scandal, and the increasingly dangerous weather itself. The novel is an ever-moving storm of emotion and politics that unfolds under churning skies and life-or-death stakes. Miranda, a young woman on the verge of adulthood and independence, is a marvelous creation and a portrait of a soul in progress. Bush brings together a complicated cast of three-dimensional men and women, all fighting with and against each other in the name of saving the planet … or making a buck. A tale of greed, hope, and love, it is a beautifully written and challenging novel by one of Canada’s best writers. — Michael Redhill, Giller-Prize-winning author of Bellevue Square
A fascinating and prescient story. With climate change as the backdrop, Catherine Bush’s lyrical portrait of the northern island landscape and a young woman’s passion for the land offers a frightening warning of how big business will surely adapt to the changes to benefit itself. Bush’s story is compelling — we watch the hurricane unfold, as only a brilliant writer can show us — and offers a moving and soulful primer for climate survival. — Shani Mootoo, author of Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab and Cereus Blooms at Midnight
Bush’s Blaze Island is a box of wind. Open its cover and you feel at once the fury of the weather to come, the future of the planet in novel form. — Brad Kessler, author of Birds in Fall and Goat Song
Description
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 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?
Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda’s days growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove, and the long-ago past that her father will not allow her to speak of — when he was a renowned scientist running a Centre for Climate and Cryosphere Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, before climate-change deniers made him their target with terrifying consequences. While Miranda contends with the astonishing secrets that the stranger, Frank Hansen, reveals to her, Caleb grapples with alarming discoveries about the three visitors who find themselves stranded on Blaze Island. 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?
Blaze Island 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. Can we truly find a haven by sheltering in place? How do you imagine a tomorrow when the present seems, whichever way you look, to be hovering on the brink of catastrophe? Dramatizing the complex emotions that arise in the face of the climate crisis and intensifying ecological loss while navigating through a world that looks less familiar by the moment, Blaze Island enfolds a gripping human story within the larger presence of the constantly shifting elements: wild winds that grow wilder, the haunting parade of icebergs that float past Miranda’s door, melting as they travel ever-farther south.
An essay on writing the climate crisis in fiction and the origins of Blaze Island, published in Canadian Notes and Queries, Special Issue: Writing in the Age of Unravelling, Winter 2020: Writing The Real.