Fauna
In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature?
A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species - humans included - are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her.
Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.
Fauna, Christiane Vadnais's first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018's best books by Radio-Canada.
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Christiane Vadnais holds an MFA in creative writing, and has long been active as an events programmer and project manager in Quebec's literary community. Radio-Canada named her a 'Young Author to Watch' for 2020. Fauna is her first work of fiction. She lives in Quebec City.
Pablo Strauss is the translator of twelve works of fiction, several graphic novels, and the screenplay of one feature film, White Dog (2022). He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace (Coach House Books, 2020), Synapses (Talonbooks, 2019), and The Longest Year (House of Anansi, 2017). The Dishwasher, his translation of Stéphane Larue's Le plongeur, won the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. He has published essays, reviews, and translations in Granta, Geist, The Literary Review of Canada, The Globe and Mail and The Montreal Review of Books. Pablo grew up in Victoria, BC, and has made his home in Quebec City for fifteen years.
"Reminiscent of Ovid, Kafka, and Wells ... [Fauna] depicts the hypnotic Darwinian nightmare our negligence and denial will lead us to in the coming years." --Le Devoir
"Vadnais's language is precise, rich in imagery, unsettling. The quality of the writing makes for a raw, searing read." --L'Express
A spirited vision of the end times that reminds us that a new one will be born out of the old, as savage and alive as the previous one's primitive beginnings. --La Presse
Vadnais's exciting debut immerses the reader into the dreamy and menacing near-future world of Shivering Heights, a flooded wilderness in the twilight of the human race. ... The sumptuous imagery and limpid atmosphere forms a dizzying picture of a world after human existence. This dark, sensual novel invites the reader to imagine nature thriving in the toxic aftermath of human domination, and makes for an essential addition to the recent crop of eco-fiction. --Publishers Weekly
