This title will be released on:
Sep 30, 2025
Description
From the acclaimed author of The Stardust Grail comes the epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister—and Earth’s environmental salvation.
In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.
But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.
But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.
Product Details
| Publisher | Flatiron Books |
| Publish Date | September 30, 2025 |
| Pages | 384 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781250380968 |
| Dimensions | 234.9 X 6.1 X 1.0 inches | 1.0 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Set in a watery world of environmental catastrophe, Saltcrop is a moving testament to the distant places we’ll sail to in order to salvage the Earth and our families. Part eco-thriller, part sisterhood epic, Kitasei has written an unforgettable novel that teems with big ideas and abundant heart." —Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author of Camp Zero
"The blighted and ruined landscapes the Shimizu sisters traverse, and the disease-struck, semi-feral communities they encounter, all feel dangerously nearby, a world three minutes into the future of our present disastrous trajectory. The love they bear for one another, even if it’s often tangled up in old pains and many mutual irritations, makes even that future feel survivable. Get a copy of Saltcrop for all the perpetually warring siblings you know." —Vajra Chandrasekera, author of the Nebula, Ignyte, Crawford, and Locus award-winning The Saint of Bright Doors
"Saltcrop's near-future world of blight and corporate greed is terrifyingly plausible, but this is a story of resilience and survival, and of the strength of family bonds. The novel finds beauty in the natural world, even as it is exploited and threatened, and it finds hope in the messy, relatable, and life-affirming love between the Shimizu sisters. Urgent and gorgeously written, Saltcrop is an adventure, a family drama, an ecological thriller, and above all a story of ordinary humans doing extraordinary things." —Sarah Brooks, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
"This is a beautiful book about the people you'd cross oceans for. A brilliant triumph and a heartfelt love letter to the siblings we don't understand but are irrevocably sworn to." —J. R. Dawson, award-winning author of The First Bright Thing
"In many recent novels, humanity has created its own apocalypse, and Kitasei’s stands with the best of them. What makes her novel rise above are the family dynamics... An unputdownable novel of family bonds and ordinary people fighting corporate greed, sure to appeal to fans of Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless and Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway." —Library Journal, starred review
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