Afield guide

Narrated by a hermit after the collapse of industrial society, Afield Guide is a coming of age novel that considers the causes and potential consequences of the climate crisis on people and plants. After a violent island storm unearths a botanical sketchbook, the narrator is forced to confront the choices, both individual and societal, that brought the planet to catastrophe. From finding romance and rare orchids to blowing up pipelines, and in the meantime raising and falling out with his daughter, the novel explores the repercussions of our actions, large and small, and the lengths we are willing to go for the people and the flora we love. In a time of increasingly polarized and frantic debate about how to best respond to the threat of climate change, Afield Guide delves into the conflicts between eco-activists and fossil fuel workers, between teachers and students, and between parents and children as they navigate the ecological, sociological, and ethical challenges of the Anthropocene. The structure of the novel grew and grows outward from fourteen wildflowers, who serve as chapter prompts, mnemonics, and characters as the narrator, and by extension the reader, are initiated into a broader and more biocentric world. Using braided narratives set in both the recent past and the near future, Afield Guide joins the budding genre of eco-fiction in its attempt to challenge and rewrite our anthropocentric relationship with the environment. At its heart, the book asks its narrator and reader the same pressing question: what can one person do to turn the tide?Arts, Faculty ofGraduat