Blue Skies

From best-selling novelist T. C. Boyle, a satirical yet ultimately moving send-up of contemporary American life in the glare of climate change.

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.

Blue Skies follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family―including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd―are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.

But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”

An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”

"Boyle, long a fervent proselytizer for environmental and animal rights, strikes the perfect satirical note to illustrate the nonchalance and obliviousness many otherwise intelligent people display…. Boyle’s genius lies in his ability to blend the horrific and the humorous, to slowly ratchet up the tension while crafting a gripping yet eerie narrative that forecasts a disaster of our own making."

― Booklist, starred review

"Spirited... Boyle remains a vibrant stylist, with fondness for his complex characters and a knack for zany details... Equal parts entertaining and anxiety inducing, this dazzles."

― Publishers Weekly

"Is climate change funny? Yes, in the brilliantly imaginative T. C. Boyle’s hands, in a terrifying way. Blue Skies is both comic and wrenching. . . . A black arrow of unimaginable horror shoots through the novel’s center, and Boyle leads us to contemplate the ‘inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything’―and a morsel of the world’s inexpressible beauty."

― Annie Proulx

"Boyle writes with a youthful and sustained energy that parallels the zeal of his dreamers, and that ultimately attenuates their failures. There are few writers who seem more American."

― Chris Bachelder, New York Times Book Review