The Diapause

"Andrew Forbes’s exquisitely rendered prose makes The Diapause both realistic and futuristic, devastating even while it is oddly hopeful. Vast and intimate, the novel absorbs and grips. I cannot shake its central image: the strange little noodles, the mysterious worms who seem to be dancing in the moments before catastrophe."—Liz Harmer, author of Strange Loops

“Lucid, intelligent, haunting, The Diapause deftly spans forty years and puts the climate crisis in focus as omnipresent reality. Andrew Forbes writes with considerable verve and tenderness on the heartbreaking ways humans fail each other and their environments. A remarkable read that sharpens our present moment, and asks what we will take into the future.”—Michelle Min Sterling, author of Camp Zero

“Both a grim look at the dark side of survivalist psychosis and a heartbreaking love letter to the disappearing worlds around us. … The Diapause could be read as a cautionary tale were it not for the beauty that Forbes manages to coax from beneath the unstoppable depression his speculative landscape serves. That the possibilities of the future he creates seem so achievable makes it something of a somber journey—its loneliness perhaps misconstrued as a bad thing. In fact, it’s Gabe’s unavoidable solitude that fuels his vigor and which Forbes writes into mesmerizing, unforgettable prose.”—Foreword Reviews, starred review