The novel is brilliantly complex, emotional, and frightening. Welby's writing really gets deep and challenges the reader to think about consequences of our ways of life.
The story takes place in the future and follows a woman named Sol and her best friend Kit, who have grown up in a cult in Arizona. A lot of the complexity of the novel is due to humans unable to truly embrace reality in all its dimensions--including how the history of humans has changed the physical, cultural, and emotional landscape of the world through conquest, ecological ruin, killings, torture, climate ruin, and so much more.
How do humans live in such a world without some utopian climate-controlled cult where drugs and sex help one to forget? And that's how the story begins. But Sol's estranged mother comes to her to let her know about her real father, that he's alive, in Japan--and it's a missing life's puzzle piece that has haunted Sol forever. Because of climate catastrophe, planes are soon being outlawed, and she and Kit catch one of the last planes to Japan.
The crazy, raw descriptions of Japan are just miraculously beautiful at times, full of Japanese myth and animal spirits, yet also horribly accurate and impactful when exploring the aftermaths from Americans' history of dumping waste and using the islands from WWII onward--and now the islands are sinking due to rising seas. There are no safe places.
Welby dives us into this haunted world of the future, to lost worlds and oneiric places, which are in ruin, screaming of the past, present, and a very questionable future. Everywhere are ghosts, memories, mutations, and consequences filtering into the present. Disease and pollution make the world a place where the only way to forget is to get inebriated somehow, but to truly rise above might just mean facing harsh truths, strengthening one's will and spirit, and finding love.