I'm trying to answer the question: how do we write climate stories in ways that make people want to read them? Can we draw more people into the climate conversation (and action) via entertaining, page-turning fiction? I'm also endlessly fascinated by the publishing industry. I work on climate policy at the municipal level and am happy to talk about climate action. I also weave, knit, ballroom dance, am learning book binding, and am a former varsity fencer (also a former aerospace engineer).
I love to talk about the process of writing, the details of Adrift (so many potential spoilers means I can only talk about it in depth with people who have read it), and how we can avoid being paralyzed by grief about climate change and continue to take action to avoid the worst of it. As a someone who succeeded in being traditionally published despite not having an MFA or any contacts in the industry, I'm also happy to chat with other writers about the traditional publication process.
Ess wakes up alone on a sailboat in the remote Pacific Northwest with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She finds a note, but it's more warning than comfort: Start over. Don't make yourself known. Don't look back.
Ess must have answers. She sails over a turbulent ocean to a town hundreds of miles away that, she hopes, might offer insight. The chilling clues she uncovers point to a desperate attempt at erasing her former life. But why? And someone is watching her...someone who knows she must never learn her truth.
In Ess's world, the earth is precariously balanced at a climate tipping point, and she is perched at the edge of a choice: which life does she want? The one taken from her—and the dangerous secret that was buried—or the new one she can make for herself?
A galvanizing riddle that is just as unmooring as it seems, this sharp character-driven odyssey explores a future challenged by our quickly changing world and the choices we must make to save what matters most.
"It's rare for a book to be a taut page-turning thriller and also be the kind of story that makes you think about the nature of self, but Lisa Brideau has managed to do just that. Full of apocalyptic tension, tempered by warm human connection, this is a book that will stay in my memory for life."
- Marissa Levien, author of The World Gives Way