When Susie Greenhill won the 2016 Richell prize for emerging writers, her writing was described by one of the judges, Michaela McGuire, as “electric, and profoundly affecting”. Her resulting novel’s release into the landscape of 2025 only makes it more so.
This stunning, devastating debut starts slowly, easing us into the future where the novel takes place, a future marked by global heating and mass extinction. Tom, a scientist working to find and preserve the fading vestiges of plant and wildlife, brings home specimens and treasures to share with his daughter, Orla, and his wife, Elena, at their home in the foothills of lutruwita/Tasmania. Feathers, skeletons and fins, “eggshells of the palest blue, a tiger snake’s translucent, papery skin”. But this poetic whimsy belies loss, as Tom is forced to reckon daily with the disappearance of the plants and animals he loves.
