An imaginative tour de force and an unforgettable family saga by a new voice in climate fiction.
CHILDREN OF TOMORROW
by J.R. Burgmann
Upswell Publishing/Black Inc. Australia, March 2023
CHILDREN OF TOMORROW is an episodic saga, a sweeping history of family and friendship, spanning multiple generations and geographies across the twenty-first century. This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change.
Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer’s bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, where they are both enrolled in a PhD, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.
CHILDREN OF TOMORROW depicts an all-too-real future history, rushing on at an unstoppable speed and fracturing the lives of its many characters, the effects of which ripple throughout subsequent generations and the earth they inherit.
J.R. Burgmann is a writer and critic. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and received his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Monash University, where he is based at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. CHILDREN OF TOMORROW, his debut novel, was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2021 in the category of unpublished manuscripts. In 2022 he was awarded a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship.
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