Blue Skies

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Blue Skies by T. C. Boyle, read by Alyssa Bresnahan.

The joyfully freewheeling, funny and profound new novel from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver)

Welcome to America. On the east coast, homes are being swallowed by the ocean; on the west coast, California is engulfed with wildfire.

But for one family, the impending environmental disaster is the least of their worries. Party girl Cat just impulse-purchased a snake; her pious brother Cooper is wrestling with a tic bite; and their mom Ottilie has resorted to cooking with crickets. Everyone is drinking too much – and the bugs seems to be disappearing. It seems as if it's anything but blue skies ahead...

A delightfully dark comedy of manners about family life at the end of the world, Blue Skies is a masterful new adventure from one of the America’s great comic writers.
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'Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences … His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented' – NEW YORK TIMES

'A virtuoso craftsman' – ANNIE PROULX

'Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges' – BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Critics Review

A mordant eco-thriller ... Boyle, who lives in California, has drawn zany satire from looming environmental catastrophe in previous works, but there’s no denying that enhanced plausibility adds fresh layers of absurdism and melancholy to his latest novel
OBSERVER
Darkly comic ... Could be a very influential book indeed
independent.co.uk
An accomplished family drama with a climate-crisis setting
NEW YORK TIMES
Is climate change funny? Yes, in the brilliantly imaginative T. C. Boyle’s hands, in a terrifying way. Blue Skies is both comic and wrenching … A black arrow of unimaginable horror shoots through the novel’s centre and Boyle leads us to contemplate the “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything” – and a morsel of the world’s inexpressible beauty
ANNIE PROULX
Boyle writes with a youthful and sustained energy that parallels the zeal of his dreamers, and that ultimately attenuates their failures
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Darkly ironic ... an expert blend of suspense, terror and, occasionally, very black humour
WASHINGTON POST
Less a novel about what might be done about the climate crisis and more an accomplished family drama with a climate-crisis setting ... Boyle doesn’t offer his own clear answer. Maybe he doesn’t need to. At this stage of the climate game, it shouldn’t take much prodding to convince us that there’s plenty of work to do if we don’t want our own families to be forced to answer Boyle’s thought problem
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Satiric and provocative ... skewering a contemporary environmental standoff modeled on real life events
LITHUB
Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences … His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented
NEW YORK TIMES
You don’t feel cheated, reading Boyle – while the head knows there’s manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps
OBSERVER
Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next
GUARDIAN
Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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