Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell

The 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction winner and a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist, Arboreality is a novella expansion of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning short story “An Important Failure.”

“Campbell doesn’t shy away from the worst possibilities of apocalyptic ecological collapse … but offers a surprisingly hopeful and joyful vision of the future … This compassionate cli-fi mosaic is sure to please genre fans.”
— Publishers Weekly

“I have yearned for a story like this one — ordinary people finding slow, small ways to repair not the whole damaged world, but their own small corner of it … I couldn’t love it more.”
— Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Hearts of Horses

A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell’s astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this multi-generational and interconnected story of how a West coast community survives the ravages of climate change.

Note: The Special Edition gold foil print which came out after Arboreality won the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is now out of stock on our website, but maybe still be available at some Canadian bookstores. The 2nd printing is coming to our webstore soon.

Customers outside of CA/US: due to supply chain issues, worldwide shipping of print books is currently slow and expensive. We recommend shopping with your local indie bookstore. If you do order a print book from us, it will be shipped from the closest print facility to you and will therefore be printed on standard paper and will not include the goodies we send with CA/US orders.