This summer I had the pleasure of reading Blaze Island by Catherine Bush in advance of its release. Blaze Island is a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Set against the backdrop of climate change, the novel raises many questions about the past, present, and future of our biosphere; about the language of weather; and about the risks of climate change denial.

I was able to ask Catherine these questions directly, in an interview for The New Quarterly, where she offered beautiful and brilliant insights about the way our world is shifting around us:

Icebergs are awesome in the truest sense: they’re huge, stunning mountains and sheets of ice. They’re also small, broken ice islands. They inspire awe. And grief. It’s an incredible thing to watch icebergs float past your back door. This is ancient ice, ice from the early days of the human story. To encounter this ice is to confront our own past from ten thousand years ago and then watch the past, which may hold the key to our future, dissolve.

Read the interview in full on The New Quarterly’s website.

You can order your copy of Blaze Island by Catherine Bush directly from the publisher.