Author Q&A
In this series of Q&As, the Climate Fiction Prize talks to each of the shortlisted writers about all things climate, fiction and the inspiration behind their novel.
- How would you summarise your book in one sentence?
The Book of Records is a novel where different centuries wash in like the tide.
- What inspired you to write this story?
A longing to see my mother again after she passed away some twenty-four years ago. Back then I told myself that one day I would write a novel set in a building made of time but I had no idea what that might mean.
- Did you set out to write a story about climate or did those themes develop through the writing process?
It emerged through the writing process as the different centuries echoed and gave rise to one another. Climate is pivotal in the middle section of the book, the centre of the novel, though which all the other stories pass.
- What’s one book you think readers should pick up after they finish your novel?
Karen Hao’s extraordinary work of reportage, Empire of AI and Hannah Arendt’s moving book of essays, Men in Dark Times.
- Is there a book (or film/TV series/play) that made you see the climate crisis differently?
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland. It made me think a great deal about loneliness, atomisation and refuge. The landscape is altered by industrial and factory work, and the landscapes are also ancient, a record of habitations that came before and will be home to everything to come.
- What would you say to a reader looking for a sense of hope in turbulent times?
I think that everything matters, all our choices, all our words. I think often of this passage from David Shulman’s book, Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills: “There is a movement in the self that goes beyond reflection. The same place in me that knows that I am free and can taste this freedom at rare moments—and this is our most fundamental knowledge of ourselves—is the place that sees where I could go, if only I stopped hesitating and thinking about futility. One very gently and compassionately puts aside the hesitation, even as the futility chorus begins its crescendo. One may need despair, the good despair, to put hesitation aside. Then, for a few moments, one can act, doubt and all.”
- How do you think storytelling can shape our response to the climate crisis and our sense of what future is possible?
I think that the stories that persist in us have a living quality. They are unresolved. Maybe this is because they’ve asked us questions which they cannot answer alone.
- What’s the one piece of advice you would give to a writer facing a blank page?
Embrace it! This beautiful openness. This two-dimensional sheet of paper that can hold so much time and life. It’s kind of miraculous.
- Floods, wars, disease and totalitarian governments plague the characters in your novel. Why was it important to you to feature climate events alongside these other forms of human suffering?
The hardest parts of this novel are about human life sweeping other human life away, and about worlds that will never return again. I think the novel is about the record we try to keep not just in writing, but in our actions and choices and ideas and devotions. I sometimes imagined the novel as a threshold place, where things come together, where many things might touch, before they break apart once more.