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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

J.R. Burgmann

Children of Tomorrow is an episodic saga, a sweeping history of family and friendship, spanning multiple generations and geographies across the twenty-first century. This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change. 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 both enrolled in a PhD, 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.

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.

J.R. Burgmann is an emerging writer and critic. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and received his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Monash University, where he is based at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. Children of Tomorrow, his debut novel, was highly commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2021 in the category of unpublished manuscripts. In 2022 he was awarded a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship.
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Published 2023-03-01 by Upswell Publishing

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North America: Great Plains Publications;

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"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 "Intimate and profound, Children of Tomorrow is a love song for a burning planet." —James Bradley "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 "In Children of Tomorrow, JR Burgmann 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

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