Clade
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017
Shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2016
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction 2016
Shortlisted for the 2016 ALS Gold Medal
Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2015
Shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Fiction 2016
Locus Recommended Reading List 2015
Selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year
“On a beach in Antarctica, scientist Adam Leith marks the passage of the summer solstice. Back in Sydney his partner Ellie waits for the results of her latest round of IVF treatment.
“The result will change both their lives and propel them into a future neither could have predicted. In a collapsing England Adam will battle to survive an apocalyptic storm. Against a backdrop of growing civil unrest at home, Ellie will discover a strange affinity with beekeeping. In the aftermath of a pandemic, a young man finds solace in building virtual recreations of the dead. And new connections will be formed from the most unlikely of beginnings.
“Clade is the story of one family in a radically changing world, a place of loss and wonder where the extraordinary mingles with the everyday. Haunting, lyrical and unexpectedly hopeful, it is the work of a writer in command of the major themes of our time.” Buy now
Praise for Clade
“Clade is a brilliant, unsettling and timely novel: a true text of the Anthropocene in its subtle shuttlings between lives, epochs and eras, and its knitting together of the planet’s places. Like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, its great subjects are deep time, swift change, and the eeriness of everyday life. Reading Clade leaves us, in Timothy Morton’s phrase, “strange strangers” to ourselves; and makes the Earth seem an odder, older, more vulnerable home.” Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks and The Old Ways
“[T]here is no one like [Bradley] in the imagining of the imminent end time of the way we live now.” Peter Pierce, Sydney Review of Books
“That rarest of novels: one that stares down its harrowing beginning to find a sense of peace and even of wonder, while being true to itself. All the way through, the prose is achingly beautiful. Bradley’s a magnificent writer and it’s all on display here: sentences and images float, poetic and sharp as crystal.” The Saturday Paper
“It is impossible not to be swept along by the sheer pace of the narrative, and we approach each new chapter hungry to find out characters’ fates and whether the world is any closer to total ruin. There are deft literary nods … and a palpable sense of urgency and consequence that is conveyed subtly, without any heavy-handed didacticism or sententiousness.” Malcolm Forbes, The Weekend Australian
“[A]mong the most literate and humane contributions to that slowly emerging tradition of what is sometimes called ‘‘slow apocalypse’’ fiction … a near-epic of loss, remembrance, and steadily diminishing hope.” Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
“A beautifully written meditation on climate collapse, concentrating on three generations of an Australian family. Bradley skilfully evokes the particularity of lived experience, and the novel is full of vivid little moments, although its real triumph is in setting these in their larger context: a world wrecked by storms and floods, changes in vegetation and the collapse of bird and bee populations . . . Bradley’s short, intense novel is as much a hymn to hope as it is a warning.” Adam Roberts, New Scientist
“A compelling story of the triumph of hope over devastation . . . Clade is a visionary book.” Elaine Fry, West Australian
“[T]he first great novel of climate change.” James Tierney, Kill Your Darlings
“What is really important in this novel is not these brilliantly rendered future disaster scenarios, but the way epic events are juxtaposed with very human stories. Clade is a book full of people struggling to find connections, not only with each other, but the wider world around them . . . There is a beauty in the way Bradley depicts sadness with such truthfulness and honesty. And in very important ways Clade is, in fact, a hopeful novel. It is a book that depicts human life and love as a shining star in the great dark abyss of time . . . Clade is not a novel about what is lost, but what we can never lose.” Luke Brown, sffworld.com
“A melodic, intense rendering . . . sharp, inventive and ultimately hopeful.” Herald Sun
“Provocative . . . Haunting.” John Affleck, Weekend Gold Coast Bulletin
“A remarkable and important novel.” Surf Coast Times
“In these relentless, brilliantly imagined apprehensions, Clade’s foretellings movingly bind the reader to the lives we all-too-human spirits live—and may live. This is the unstinting dreaming and devoted craft-work of a deeply serious, marvelously accomplished artist taking on the absolutely essential.” Thomas Farber, author of Brief Nudity, On Water and The Beholder
Readers in Australia and New Zealand can buy the print edition from any good bricks and mortar bookstore or their favourite online bookseller or pick up the ebook from the iBookstore, the Kobo store, Amazon.com or Amazon.com.au. Readers outside Australia can order the print edition via Book Depository.
More information
If you’re curious about the title you can read a little piece I wrote for Penguin about it or check out the interview with Booktopia TV below. Alternatively you can watch Geordie Williamson’s characteristically thoughtful and generous launch speech, read my essay about writing the Anthropocene or a few thoughts about genre and climate change I put together at the end of 2015.
city of tongues 