Description: Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye's new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.
As in Ling Ma's Severance and Emily Mandel's Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild. Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.Review Quotes: "An allegorical tale about humanity's inherent morality: Are we naturally good or evil; why is it imperative we exist in opposition to something; will we--when given the chance to start over--build a society that is caring and inclusive, or will we find a way to repeat the errors that resulted in the world we currently inhabit, one dependent on arbitrary hierarchies. . . . Readers are given plenty to think about and the space in which to do their thinking, both conditions that keep them living within the story long after they shut the cover." --Cory Oldweiler, Words Without Borders
"Poetic and ominous, Artem Chapeye's The Weathering radically questions the kind of world we have built for ourselves. It is a hauntingly beautiful novel that offers no answers, but at least tries to leave us with hope." --Krisztina Tóth, author of Eye of the Monkey "An empathetic, emotionally raw account that is as darkly humorous as it is horrific, The Weathering balances the universality of humankind's survival in a post-apocalyptic world through a uniquely Ukrainian perspective. Chapeye has created an apocalyptic world that is itself a living monster: a destructive, electrochemical force that will make your hair stand on end. Even still, The Weathering is a deeply compassionate novel that cultivates an arresting tenderness not just for its protagonists, but for its world." --Kalani Pickhart, NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of I Will Die in a Foreign Land