A Friend of the Earth

One of LitHub’s 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library

“Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the darkly comic.” -Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

Originally published in 2000, T. C. Boyle’s prescient novel about global warming and ecological collapse

It is the year 2025. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most mammals–not to mention fish, birds, and frogs–are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star’s private menagerie that only a mother could love–scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions.

It wasn’t always like this for Ty. Once he was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. as a member of the radical group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter Sierra and his wife Andrea. Now, just when he’s trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life.

T. C. Boyle’s eighth novel blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species.