Sea Change

December 23, 2019
This quietly revelatory bio-thriller from Nebula Award–winner Kress (Beggars in Spain) follows one woman’s moral persistence in the face of a near-future worldwide emergency. Following a nationwide biochemical contamination and a major financial crisis, Luddite panic sweeps America, resulting in a ban on all GMO products and research. Now, in 2032, humanity is facing famine caused by global warming, making it vital to find ways to adapt plants to new growing conditions, despite such experiments being outlawed. Caroline Denton has always fought for humanity’s survival, and after Domoic acid released by an immense oceanic algae bloom kills her son Ian, she commits even more fiercely to aiding in top secret GMO research. As a courier for the Org, an underground group of scientists developing better food plants, Caroline passes communications between a network of small, clandestine research facilities—until raids by law enforcement make it clear that the Org has a mole in its midst. Kress wisely keeps her global catastrophe on a human scale, eschewing superheroic action for tense realism. This urgent, deeply satisfying story is as tenacious and inspiring as its heroine.

April 1, 2020
Kress' latest is one woman's story of climate change, espionage, and how the political is intensely personal. After Renata's son is inadvertently killed by a poisonous algae bloom, she's recruited for a secretive organization that struggles to develop genetically modified crops in an environment of suspicion and sabotage. Society has broken down after a long-trusted biopharmed antidiarrheal children's drug became suddenly lethal through horizontal gene transfer, and the elimination of GMO crops means that the world is now going hungry. Kress writes a brilliantly imagined near-future complete with false identities and analog spycraft mixed into an aggressively digital world in which greenhouses hiding GMO carrots are as vulnerable as missile bases, drivie houses cruise unassisted down streets, and disinformation campaigns blaze on social media. As Renata's story unfolds, readers learn more about her ties to the Quinault Nation and her tragic past just as she discovers the horrible truth about her current mission. An ecothriller that urgently asks readers, Which side will you take when your personal life and the world as you know it completely collapses?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)