THE BOOK OF RAIN

The Book of Rain is an environmental literary suspense novel set in the near future, in a mining community where a new ore's strange properties create anomalous effects in the town known as "decoherences" that disrupt the lives and health of the locals and gradually destroy their environment. A young man who grew up there returns to search for his sister, who has disappeared into the forbidden toxic zone to rescue the animals there.

Inspired in its shape and structure by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Richard Powers' The Overstory, The Book of Rain takes us to a fictional town called River Meadows, where an ore called "ghost" is being extracted from underneath the boreal forest. The ore's strange properties create anomalous effects in the town known as "decoherences" that disrupt the lives and health of the locals and gradually destroy their environment. There are slippages in time and place, altered mental states, phenomena called "wobbles" that alter perception and bring visions of other possible realities. In an attempt to stave off climate disaster, scientists have created "hackable" clouds designed to bring rain where it is needed. But the clouds escape their human controllers and go "feral," adding to the anthropogenic environmental chaos.

Alex Hewitt first came to River Meadows with his family as a young teenager. After he has grown up and moved away, the ghost industry collapses and eventually leaves behind a dangerous "forbidden zone" called the Park after residents are forced to flee. Now Alex returns to search for his sister Amery, who has gone missing in the Park while trying to rescue the animals in it. It is the mystery of her disappearance and Alex's feeling of guilt over what has become of his sister's life that drive the novel.

Claire Foley escapes her unhappy youth in River Meadows by working for a travel publisher that sends her around the world updating guidebooks. In secret she also traffics in illegal animal parts. Now Claire has come to an unnamed island nation, a modern-day Atlantis that hasn't yet sunk beneath the waves, where she finds herself responsible for an exotic endangered crane, and has to choose between exploiting the situation for gain or saving the bird from extinction.

The novel flashes back in history and, finally at the end, forward to a post-apocalyptic future, where animals share a language called Uttering and have banded together to protect themselves from humans.

THOMAS WHARTON has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Japan, and other countries. His first novel, Icefields, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean and was also a 2008 CBC Canada Reads pick. His next book, Salamander, was shortlisted for the 2001 Governor General's Award for Fiction and was also a finalist for the Roger's Writers' Trust Fiction Prize the same year. In 2006, Wharton's collection of stories, The Logogryph, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Thomas currently lives near Edmonton, Alberta.