Even If Everything Ends
Life goes on in the face of a climate crisis in this unforgettable, “relevant, and entertaining” (Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author) debut novel that follows four characters as they struggle to survive in a burning world.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenage love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and rebellions against hopeless parents continue to play out.

Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years. André is the nineteen-year-old loser son of an international sports star who uses the erupting violence around him to orchestrate his own personal vengeance on his negligent father. And Vilja is Didrik's teenage daughter who steps into a leadership role in the face of adult ineptitude.

“A devilish twist on climate fiction” (Publishers Weekly), The Burning eloquently illustrates a picture of a very near future that is at once extraordinary and entirely realistic.

The Burning was previously published as Even If Everything Ends.
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Even If Everything Ends
Life goes on in the face of a climate crisis in this unforgettable, “relevant, and entertaining” (Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author) debut novel that follows four characters as they struggle to survive in a burning world.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenage love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and rebellions against hopeless parents continue to play out.

Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years. André is the nineteen-year-old loser son of an international sports star who uses the erupting violence around him to orchestrate his own personal vengeance on his negligent father. And Vilja is Didrik's teenage daughter who steps into a leadership role in the face of adult ineptitude.

“A devilish twist on climate fiction” (Publishers Weekly), The Burning eloquently illustrates a picture of a very near future that is at once extraordinary and entirely realistic.

The Burning was previously published as Even If Everything Ends.
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Even If Everything Ends

Even If Everything Ends

Unabridged — 16 hours, 31 minutes

Even If Everything Ends

Even If Everything Ends

Unabridged — 16 hours, 31 minutes

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Overview

Life goes on in the face of a climate crisis in this unforgettable, “relevant, and entertaining” (Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author) debut novel that follows four characters as they struggle to survive in a burning world.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenage love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and rebellions against hopeless parents continue to play out.

Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years. André is the nineteen-year-old loser son of an international sports star who uses the erupting violence around him to orchestrate his own personal vengeance on his negligent father. And Vilja is Didrik's teenage daughter who steps into a leadership role in the face of adult ineptitude.

“A devilish twist on climate fiction” (Publishers Weekly), The Burning eloquently illustrates a picture of a very near future that is at once extraordinary and entirely realistic.

The Burning was previously published as Even If Everything Ends.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

An engaging climate change satire . . . Liljestrand gets in plenty of barbs at the various players as they cling to their old lives amid disaster. It makes for a devilish twist on climate fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

"Clever and engaging. Liljestrand succeeds in being both relevant and entertaining." —Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove

“The action of the novel is tense . . . but the strongest elements of the narrative are the depth and nuance of the characters’ inner monologues . . . A sense of apocalyptic doom throws the relatively petty concerns of the characters into sharp relief even as their humanity is affirmed by the author’s careful attention to their quirks and unique perspectives . . . An absorbing and sobering reckoning with all-too-familiar disasters, both personal and planetary.” —Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2023-02-24
A Swedish family struggles to cope with climatological disaster.

The von der Esch family—father Didrik, mother Carola, teen daughter Vilja, little brother Zack, and baby Becka—evacuate their summer house in Dalarna as global warming–generated wildfires rage out of control. The author shifts between various family members and characters in their orbit to give first-person accounts of the chaotic aftermath, during which the family is separated (wounded Zack goes off with strangers with a working car; Didrik takes the vulnerable Becka on a crowded train back to Stockholm; Carola and Vilja make their way to an ad hoc refugee camp) and attempts to survive the crisis and hopefully reunite after the worst has passed. The action of the novel is tense, as the oppressive heat, lack of basic resources, and crumbling social contract threaten to overwhelm the embattled clan, but the strongest elements of the narrative are the depth and nuance of the characters’ inner monologues. Didrik, a somewhat pompous PR exec, experiences the catastrophe as a test of his masculinity. Vilja, characterized as selfish and bratty by her father, displays remarkable courage and maturity in navigating the fraught environment of the camp. Didrik’s mistress, Melissa, an ostensibly vacuous social media influencer safely ensconced in a luxury apartment in Stockholm, leads a rich inner life revolving around her pill addiction and borderline sociopathic manipulativeness. André, the teenage son of the tennis legend whose apartment Melissa is housesitting, drowns in insecurities and resentment as he embarks on an ill-advised nautical adventure. A sense of apocalyptic doom throws the relatively petty concerns of the characters into sharp relief even as their humanity is affirmed by the author’s careful attention to their quirks and unique perspectives. There are no villains here aside from climate change—an outward manifestation and inevitable consequence of the self-destructive impulses so relatably embodied by Liljestrand’s cast of haplessly civilized refugees.

An absorbing and sobering reckoning with all-too-familiar disasters, both personal and planetary.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940176860115
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 05/09/2023
Edition description: Unabridged
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