Children of Tomorrow
J.R. Burgmann
Description
Children of Tomorrow depicts an all-too-real future history, rushing on at an unstoppable speed and fracturing the lives of its many characters, the effects of which ripple throughout subsequent generations and the earth they inherit. Children of Tomorrow is an episodic saga, a sweeping history of family and friendship, spanning multiple generations and geographies across the twenty-first century. Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer’s bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, where they are pursuing PhDs, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.
Originally published in Australia in the spring of 2023, Enfield & Wizenty is thrilled to introduce this timely novel to a wider audience.
Advance Praise
“Luminous, thoughtful, unflinching — there’s a breathless relentlessness to the increasing carbon dioxide numbers that kept me flipping pages as if it were a thriller. But even as it portrays the disasters and collapses, it also portrays what’s best about humanity: our capacity to hope, love, change, and forgive. A stunning and necessary addition to the existing oeuvre of climate change fiction.” —Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds
“With echoes of Kim Stanley Robinson, James Bradley and Richard Powers, JR Burgmann provides a lyrical catalogue of the terrifying crises to come. If you’re waiting for a hero to save us, Children of Tomorrow is a timely reminder that climate change is caused by a complex network of people, and that collective action and diverse approaches are our only way out of this.” —Jane Rawson, From The Wreck
“In Children of Tomorrow, James Burgmann-Milner delivers a pre-emptive elegy to our world as it spins through the 21st century into what could conceivably be the human race’s endgame. The tension increases chapter by chapter much like the carbon dioxide in the air, preventing characters, and us, from breathing easily. And yet, as resources dwindle, stability vanishes and long-held values and viewpoints fall by the wayside, the relationships and networks that bind us to each other in our inevitably shared destiny hold, just about, though not without cost, and certainly not without grief. This novel doesn’t pull its punches but does, ultimately, nail its colours to the mast of that most persistent and valuable of all human commodities: hope.” —Paul Dalgarno, A Country of Eternal Light
“Children of Tomorrow is a vivid and disturbing vision of what could happen in this coming century if we don’t respond well to the current polycrisis. It’ s not a matter of end of everything apocalypse, but rather a continuous epic struggle to cope with wild change. Burgmann shows how the novel can be put back to its proper use describing history itself, by way of braided swift stories of people doing the epic work of survival. A novel to remember!” —Kim Stanley Robinson
J.R. Burgmann
Additional information
| Format: | Paperback, Pre-order paperback |
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Media
Children of Tomorrow and J.R. Burgmann on Homegrown: Locally Produced Reads at All Lit Up.
Reviews
“Character development is one of the strongest aspects of the story, as it follows the way each member of the group lives with trying to find ‘hope in a hopeless time.’ Trying to do meaningful work, to love, to have and raise children, and to grow old, leaving behind those children who might have no future.”—Marianne Cerilli, Change Agent, Community Development for Health, Sustainability, Peace.
