- Title:
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The City Where We Once Lived
- Written by:
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Eric Barnes
- Read by:
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Patrick Lawlor
- Format:
-
Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
-
7
- Duration:
-
8 hours 45 minutes
- Published:
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May 28 2018
- Available Date:
-
May 28 2018
- Age Category:
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Adult
- ISBN:
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9781978602151
- Genres:
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Fiction; Contemporary Science Fiction; Science Fiction
- Publisher:
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Bolinda/Brilliance audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
A riveting journey into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is at once utterly foreign and hauntingly familiar.
In a near future where climate change has severely affected weather and agriculture, the North End of an unnamed city has long been abandoned in favour of the neighbouring South End. Aside from the scavengers steadily stripping the empty city to its bones, only a few thousand people remain content to live quietly among the crumbling metropolis. Many, like the narrator, are there to try to escape the demons of their past. He spends his time observing and recording the decay around him, attempting to bury memories of what he has lost.
But it eventually becomes clear that things are unraveling elsewhere as well, as strangers, violent and desperate alike, begin to appear in the North End, spreading the word of social and political deterioration in the South End and beyond. Faced with a growing disruption to his isolated life, the narrator discovers within himself a surprising need to resist losing the home he has created in this empty place. He and the rest of the citizens of the North End must choose whether to face outsiders as invaders or welcome them as neighbours.
The City Where We Once Lived is a haunting novel that combines a prescient look at how climate change and the industrial flight will shape our world with a deeply personal story of one man running from his past. With glowing prose, Eric Barnes brings into sharp focus questions of how we come to call a place home and what our capacity for violence is when that home becomes threatened.
'Barnes's new novel is a rare and truly original work ... An eerie, beautifully written, and profoundly humane book.'
Emily St. John Mandel
'In bare-bones prose that is subtly affecting, the novel is a haunting portrait of why people form bonds and the many ways those bonds can be torn apart ... A story of adaption and the power of the human spirit.'
Foreword Reviews