A slim, lovely book that I picked from the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction shortlist; it has since been awarded the prize! It is a collection of interrelated stories with a few different narrators, a format which I somewhat struggle with–it reminded me of Semiosis in that way, where the changing narrators were necessary to follow a multigenerational story of a community, but in each chapter you have to get your bearings all over again. The story begins a few decades in our future, as a university library on the Canadian west coast is dismantled in the face of constant rain and floats. Some of the books travel to an island community on the Salish Sea, and the rest of the chapters chart the survival of this community over several generations as they relearn permaculture and struggle to stave off wildfire and floods. Each story is grounded in the geographical and ecological specificity of this region, which offers some lifesaving opportunities but also isolates the island from other regions. (Eventually, we learn that other communities solved their local climate crises differently, with technological advancement rather than organic tools.) It is a melancholy book, as its characters tend to mourn a way of life they cannot return to and resent the amount of energy that must be sunk into survival. Yet it is also hopeful–more hopeful than The New Wilderness, which is also interested in the hardship of survival. Communities shrink but endure, impart communal values and ethics, take pains to preserve music and poetry when possible.