When the last shore drowns

When the Last Shore Drowns

The data arrived at 3:47 on a Tuesday morning. Dr. Yael Okonkwo already knew, before she'd finished the first page, that the world had ended. It just didn't know it yet.

The Thwaites Glacier has crossed its tipping point. Sixty metres of sea-level rise is no longer a projection — it is a promise. And humanity has perhaps fifteen years before the coastlines it built its civilisation on become the floor of the sea.

From the Arctic monitoring station where the numbers first changed, to the engineering halls of Reykjavik where visionary architects race to build floating cities before the window closes; from the launchpads of Kazakhstan where a thousand-person lunar colony is assembled against the odds, to the streets of Buenos Aires where millions demand to know why their lives don't appear on any list — When the Last Shore Drowns is the story of a species at the edge of itself.

Brilliant, flawed, driven by grief and love and stubbornness and guilt, the people of this novel build Arks and moon bases and protest movements and, in one extraordinary case, a single sealed room in the mountains of Wales. They make impossible choices. They live with the consequences. Some of them survive.

Spanning fifty years and every corner of the globe, this is a novel about what we lose when the world we built goes under — and what, improbably, stubbornly, we carry with us into whatever comes next.

For the generation that was warned.

📖 140 pages