Arboreality - by Rebecca Campbell (Paperback)

About the Book

"A novella-length expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning short story "An Important Failure," Arboreality is an intergenerational and interconnected story about the desettlement of British Columbia after climate change intensifies floods and wildfires. A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell's astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this multi-generational and interconnected story of how a West coast community survives the ravages of climate change."--

Book Synopsis

An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell's astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this multi-generational and interconnected story of how a West coast community survives the ravages of climate change.

Review Quotes

"Campbell doesn't shy away from the worst possibilities of apocalyptic ecological collapse ... but offers a surprisingly hopeful and joyful vision of the future ... This compassionate cli-fi mosaic is sure to please genre fans."

- Publishers Weekly

"I have yearned for a story like this one - ordinary people finding slow, small ways to repair not the whole damaged world, but their own small corner of it ... I couldn't love it more."

- Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Hearts of Horses

"You'll see the world differently after reading this slender book-I dare you to come away unchanged."

- Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur's Wife

About the Author

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. She won the Sunburst Award for short fiction in 2020 for "The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest," the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for "An Important Failure," and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction in 2023 for Arboreality. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013.