There is a lyrical sense that is not to be hurried in Lucy Treloar’s writing. She writes you slowly into the world of her novels and you need to spend some time and pay attention. In her first novel, Salt Creek, she wrote us into the world of a young white woman moving to the Coorong in the nineteenth century, learning to live in an unfamiliar landscape and growing in to herawareness of all that the presence of her people destroyed. In Wolfe Island, we start again in an estuary, we start again with a woman of hardy mind and strong spirit, but we are at an end point now, the destruction has been wrought. Though a date is never given, it is sometime in the very near future.

Wolfe Island is part of the Chesapeake Bay estuary off the east coast of the US and it has been taken by the sea. All the islands are slowly submerging; most of the landscape is now only accessible in Kitty Hawke’s memories. Kitty is from Wolfe Island; her people have been there for centuries and she is the last remaining inhabitant. An artist, Kitty prefers solitude with her wolfdog, Girl, and her memories, to what is happening on the mainland. But she is pulled back into the world by the arrival of her granddaughter and her granddaughter’s friends. They arerunning from a world Kitty has already left. This world is an America in which climate crisis is literally eating away at the coast. It’s a world in which people seeking refuge from ‘down south’ are called ‘runners’, and are locked up.

If this sounds like a climate-change dystopia – well, it is, and it isn’t. It is foremost a story of individual separateness and grief, of strength and love, and of the way seismic change happens and people choose to look away. It is a story of now. I loved it, and I loved the grief it brought me.

Marie Matteson is a book buyer at Readings Carlton.