Thinking of the roles of narratives in responding to the climate crisis, the most obvious one that comes to mind is the effective reach of narratives that connect us to the crisis, emotionally and intellectually.

There is an element of the unexpected in the twinning of fiction and ecology. A sense of unease of sorts exists in the pairing together of fiction, a form of narrative that is untrue, with the imminent ecological disaster, an environmental inevitability that is true.

The book explores our inability at the level of literature, history, and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.