Charlotte McConaghy is a writer of rare atmospheric power, able to render landscape and grief as a single continuous thing, so that you cannot quite say where the weather ends and the mourning begins.

The novel belongs, for me, to a growing body of work wrestling with what it means to love a world that is being lost. I think of Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, and James Bridle’s Ways of Being, but also of Amitav Ghosh’s insistence that climate is not merely a subject for literature but a test of its seriousness. McConaghy passes that test, not through argument but through feeling. Her characters live on a remote island at the edge of the collapsing world, and the isolation is both literal and moral: a staging ground for asking what joy, hope, and love look like when the thing you are faithful to may not survive.

What hooked me early was the refusal of easy consolation. There is no rescue here in the conventional sense. What there is, instead, is something more durable: a commitment to remaining present to what is, even when presence is painful. One of the book’s quieter achievements is showing how love persists not despite loss but somehow inside it, the way certain plants grow only in disturbed soil.

There are so many beautiful moments in the novel. Moments of profound love and heartbreaking darkness, but one of the novel’s charming quirks is the character of a 9-year-old boy, Orly, who tells stories of seeds. With Orly as narrator, the reader is invited to consider how humans attend to the timescapes of the seeds, plants, and animals with whom we share this beautiful planet. Orly and the novel press us to consider, anew, the survival of the humble dandelion and the magnificent humpback whale. Saving either takes great effort, sacrifice, and imagination.