Published 21July 2024. Click here for Kindle edition; paperback to follow.
The Way We Leave is the story of a contemporary love affair set against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe, deep aeons of time, and the quandary of being human at the end of history and the end of nature.
Read a long excerpt here.
Every other climate change-related novel I've seen is future-set and dystopian. The Way We Leave is neither. It's very much set in the present day, and concerns ordinary people living out their lives in an utterly changed world. It would have been easy for me to write a dystopian drama I think but that wasn't the book I wanted to do. As the narrator of the novel says, ‘Cataclysm abounds these days. It has become our entertainment. It has become our pornography.’
The Way We Leave was written between July and October 2022, with final draft December 2022 to February 2023 and additional tinkering March and April 2023. The soundtrack to its composition and editing comprised Brian Eno, Julian Cope, Dead Can Dance, and Near Earth Orbit, amongst others.