Acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, Juhea Kim’s first short story collection, a love story from the end of the world is an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world. To celebrate it’s publication this month, Juhea has shared with us her top-five cli-fi reads.
I still remember reading this wondrous story collection over a solo lunch at a vegan café and trying to discreetly wipe away tears. I find there are plenty of cli-fi books nowadays but precious few that speak to empathy. It requires the writer’s own empathy to awaken that of the reader, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri puts herself into the page with delicate courage. My favourite story is the one of a donkey in a zoo in Gaza – a whimsical and heartbreaking parable.
In a near future world where Earth has undergone a complete ecological collapse and there are no biospheres remaining, the last surviving members of the animal kingdom are kept in a zoo on Alcatraz Island. Camille, one of the zookeepers, finds her routine disrupted by the arrival of a new colleague named Sailor. The Island of Last Things asks, do our human lives have meaning without nature or non-human lives? Do any lives have meaning without freedom? Whilst the questions are profound, the prose bounces off the page with pizzicato levity. “Felix is our lone jaguar. The last jaguar before him died of despair. That wasn’t the official cause of death, of course not, but we all knew it.” It’s a particular achievement to be funny, tragic, empathetic, and ironic all at once.
Back in 2009 when this book was published, we were still six years away from the Paris Agreement and eleven years away from COVID-19. The Year of the Flood feels prophetic in its prescience and hyperreal in delivery. The novel follows the survivors in a world where a global pandemic has wiped out humanity, tying in multiple themes and subplots of sexual violence, religion and cult, disease and apocalypse. That the end result is this engrossing and fascinating novel is a testament to Atwood’s masterful world-building.
Deep in the Appalachia, a young mother dreaming of an escape from a dull marriage discovers a colony of sleeping monarch butterflies that haven’t migrated south for the winter. As the locals, the religious, scientists, and the greater world grapple with this phenomenon, the planetary issue of climate change unfolds on this small-town setting with operatic intensity. This is a rich, empathetic, and complex novel that turns macro issues – poverty, inequity, religion, and climate crisis – into the personal.
Butler’s haunting 1993 novel takes place in mid-2020s California, devastated by environmental degradation, climate crisis, inequality, disease, and war. Lauren is a teenager born with a disability of hyper-empathy, which leads her to leave her home and found a religion she calls “Earthseed.” The novel references the biblical Parable of the Sower about a farmer scattering seeds indiscriminately: some of the seeds fall on rocky or bad soil, and fail to grow, but some of the seeds fall on good soil where they produce a bounty. Parable of the Sower is a powerful testament to human agency even under overwhelming circumstances – which sadly bear too much resemblance to our own present.
