Mireille Dushaw

Although in this book, I think there is an existential question that is at its centre.

So yeah, they're very spare, very compact, and they're perhaps an acquired taste, because I don't know that everyone loves that style, but I certainly am a fan.

Lizzie, from memory, is a 44-year-old university librarian.

I think was studying at some point because she soon takes up a position with her former uni supervisor, Sylvia Lilla, who has been restyled as a climate guru and runs a podcast called Hell or High Water.

And she asks Lizzie to come and work for her, travel with her a little bit, but mostly reply to the increasingly crazy emails that she receives at the podcast from right wingers, doomers, preppers, people with profound questions about what's happening to the climate.

What sorts of things can we expect given the coming apocalypse?

And it's Lizzie's task to reply to these letters.

But she's a Brooklyn mother of a young son called Eli.

She has a husband and she has a brother who's struggling with addiction.

I think it's her sort of intense noticing of absurd and strange things.

She's not interested in everyday observation.

She's interested in some of the more bizarre facts and speculations about what's happening to our world.

And she, she has an acute attention to the things happening around her on the street, on the subway.

And they're not perhaps, I mean, I think this is the thing that makes the novel is that all her observations are unexpected and unusual.

I remember one scene early in the novel where she's at home with her son and she finds something under the kitchen cabinet and is, you know, sort of, I think it's she finds it and she's,

She's extremely alarmed.

She realises that they're killing rats without even having set traps for them.

And then there's a pause.

Yes, a rat skull.

And then there's a sort of pause, which is what this format that she uses does so well.