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Description
The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of the isolated house where Milan Wells lives with his daughter, Miranda.
Seemingly safe in her father’s realm, Miranda walks the island’s rocky shores, helping her father with his daily weather records. But the stranger’s arrival breaks open Miranda’s world, stirs up memories of events of long ago and compels her to wonder what her father is up to with his mysterious weather experiments.
In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly that she hardly knows what has happened or what the unpredictable future will bring.
Contributor Notes
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation, the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head, The Rules of Engagement, a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year, and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is Coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA and can be found online at www.catherinebush.com. She lives in Toronto.
Mary Lewis is a screenwriter, filmmaker, and actress. She is the recipient of over a dozen awards, including a Gemini and a Genie. She lives in St. John’s and Toronto.
Awards
- , Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection
- , A <i>Globe and Mail</i> Top 100 Selection
- , One of 49th Shelf's Books of the Year (Fiction)
Editorial Reviews
"Blaze Island is 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 <i>Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab</i>
"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 <i>Something for Everyone</i>
"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."
— <i>Maclean's</i>
"Catherine Bush has done her homework for this book."
— <i>Consumed by Ink</i>
"Bush’s Blaze Island is a fierce 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 <i>Birds in Fall</i> and <i>Goat Song</i>
"[Miranda is] the daughter of a renowned climate scientist whose reputation has been shredded by a hostile establishment determined to discredit his warnings of environmental catastrophe. The two end up in exile on a tiny island in the North Atlantic, setting the stage for an elegantly crafted story that also proves to be a sizzling ecological thriller."
— <i>O Canada.com</i>
"I thought Bush was very creative with her adaption and that the climate change aspect worked surprisingly well with her retelling, especially with the recent forest fires in B.C. and how it’s affected the weather in Ontario."
— <i>Not Sarah Connor Writes</i>
"A page-turner that confers a moral imperative of our time."
— <i>Writers' Trust of Canada</i>
"Blaze Island is a perfect combination of a character-driven narrative and a strong underlying plot. ... it fizzles and pops, releasing bubbles of information slowly over time."
— <i>Journal of Newfoundland Studies</i>
"You can actually feel and smell all of Newfoundland in Catherine Bush’s nail-biter novel."
— <i>Harrowsmith</i>
"Riveting and morally complex, this 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 <i>Birds, Art, Life</i>
"It’s a book that has stayed with me, that I think about almost daily and has the power, I believe, to awaken people from their apathy."
— <i>Carousel Magazine</i>
"The novel poses morally complex questions. It does so with the tautness of a thriller and the luxuriant precision of poetry."
— <i>Atlantic Books Today</i>
"Timely ... a gripping page-turner."
— <i>Elle Canada</i>
"In the famous end of The Tempest, Prospero asks that the audience free him and the other characters from the dream of the play. Blaze Island amounts to a similar request. To deny or ignore our changing world is to stay willfully dreaming."
— <i>Bookshelf</i>
"Blaze Island is a timely, clever, deftly plotted, and deeply moving eco-thriller that cautions its reader against a technoescapist fix to ecocidal warming."
— <i>Canadian Literature</i>
"[Bush] creates characters who are grappling with issues that extend beyond their domestic lives, encompassing broader public threats or concerns. In Blaze Island, she lays out a very real and present dilemma that each character confronts differently."
— <i>NUVO Magazine</i>
"A prediction of what is to come should we fail to heed the mounting evidence of the current climate crisis."
— <i>Quill & Quire</i>
"She points out a dire situation that climate change could bring and offers us food for thought towards a better future."
— <i>Miramichi Reader</i>
"Blaze Island is a beautiful, far-seeing, and fiercely intelligent novel about the most critical question of our time. 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 <i>Heartbreaker</i>
"A captivating read!"
— <i>Check It Out</i>
"Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island — an ever-moving storm of emotion and politics that unfolds under churning skies and life-or-death stakes. 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."
— Michael Redhill, Giller Prize winning author of <i>Bellevue Square</i>
“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.” — Brian Bethune, Maclean’s
“Blaze Island is 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
“Bush’s Blaze Island is a fierce 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
“Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island — an ever-moving storm of emotion and politics that unfolds under churning skies and life-or-death stakes. 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.” — Michael Redhill, Giller Prize winning author of Bellevue Square
