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Even If Everything Ends

Even If Everything Ends

Current price: $29.99
Publication Date: May 9th, 2023
Publisher:
Gallery/Scout Press
ISBN:
9781668005019
Pages:
448
Good Neighbor Bookstore
3 on hand, as of Mar 28 7:37pm
(Fiction)
Available

Description

Life goes on in the face of a climate crisis in this astonishing and unforgettable debut novel that follows four characters as they struggle to survive in a burning world.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenaged love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and revolts against hopeless parents continue to play out.

Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of masculine incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years. André is the nineteen-year-old loser son of an international sports star who uses the erupting violence around him to orchestrate his own personal vengeance on his negligent father. And Vilja is Didrik’s teenaged daughter who steps into a leadership role in the face of adult ineptitude.

“Simultaneously nerve-wracking, astute, and consumedly entertaining” (Sydsvenskan, Sweden) and through these four related stories, Even If Everything Ends eloquently illustrates a picture of a very near future that is at once extraordinary and entirely realistic.

About the Author

Jens Liljestrand is a critically acclaimed journalist and writer in his native Sweden. He has been a critic for the newspapers Sydsvenskan and Dagens Nyheter and was a long-serving editor of the culture section of Expressen. His bestselling biography about Vilhelm Moberg, The Man in the Woods, was nominated for the prestigious August Prize. The Burning (previously published as Even If Everything Ends) is his first novel.

Praise for Even If Everything Ends

“An engaging climate change satire . . . Liljestrand gets in plenty of barbs at the various players as they cling to their old lives amid disaster. It makes for a devilish twist on climate fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

"Clever and engaging. Liljestrand succeeds in being both relevant and entertaining." —Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove

“The action of the novel is tense . . . but the strongest elements of the narrative are the depth and nuance of the characters’ inner monologues . . . A sense of apocalyptic doom throws the relatively petty concerns of the characters into sharp relief even as their humanity is affirmed by the author’s careful attention to their quirks and unique perspectives . . . An absorbing and sobering reckoning with all-too-familiar disasters, both personal and planetary.” —Kirkus Reviews