Above the Ether

May 15, 2019
Barnes' acclaimed dystopian novel The City Where We Once Lived (2018) followed an unnamed reporter's struggles to stay alive in a decaying urban landscape wracked by climate change. In this equally unsettling prequel, Barnes moves the time line back to catastrophic events that occurred before the previous work, including an earthquake and tsunami flooding the Gulf states, while chronicling the fates of several sets of characters converging on a divided twin-city metropolis where prosperous South Enders have forsaken a mostly abandoned North End. A father and two children flee down a waterlogged highway to escape the tsunami. A grief-stricken couple mourning the loss of one son to addiction follows a detective's lead to track down another son. A doctor and his wife plot to escape a gang-controlled immigrant camp. Barnes' spare and chilling prose flows from one horrific scene to another without, surprisingly, alienating his readers, perhaps because the heart of his narrative ultimately reveals an abiding faith in the power of human compassion. A first-rate apocalyptic page-turner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)