The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

Product Description

“Cade’s strength shines in her beautiful descriptions … This thoughtful work is a reminder of humanity’s connection and responsibility to the natural world.” — Publishers Weekly“Uncanny, unsettling, brilliant, etcetera; as well as the thylacines there are jellyfish, robots, rock wrens, rats, and a new kind of psychological devastation that flourishes and evolves as everything else collapses. Called simply “Grief”, it is contagious, and hard to spot, and it feels like a creature that’s already here.” — Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff Book ReportIn a dying world, grief has a life of its own … With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby’s friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the Grief, the letters she leaves behind reveal the hidden world of the resurrected dead. The Tasmanian tiger, brought back from extinction in an isolated facility, is only the first … but rebirth is not always biological, and it comes with a price. As a scientist, Ruby resists the Grief by focusing her research on resilient jellyfish, but she can’t avoid choosing which side she’s on. How can she fight against the dead and the forces behind them when doing so risks her home, her life, and the entire biosphere?

Review

“Cade’s strength shines in her beautiful descriptions … This thoughtful work is a reminder of humanity’s connection and responsibility to the natural world.” – Publishers Weekly

“Uncanny, unsettling, brilliant, etcetera; as well as the thylacines there are jellyfish, robots, rock wrens, rats, and a new kind of psychological devastation that flourishes and evolves as everything else collapses. Called simply “Grief”, it is contagious, and hard to spot, and it feels like a creature that’s already here.” – Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff Book Report

“The Impossible Resurrection of Grief will haunt you. An examination of the emotional resonance of extinction through well-wrought characters, the book’s themes of connection and loss and the crushing burden of caring are revealed by Cade’s signature lyrical prose in an all-too plausible near future. There are no easy answers to be found here, but Cade offers a glimpse toward a way through the grief of both everyday and extraordinary losses.” – Nebula Award finalist M. Darusha Wehm, author of The Voyage of the White Cloud

About the Author

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication. She attended Clarion West 2016, has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards for speculative fiction, and is a Bram Stoker nominee. She was the 2020 writer in residence at Massey University, where she wrote this novella.