In The Great Transition, his first novel, Nick Fuller Googins delivers the equivalent of a Michael Bay film, filled with pulse-pounding scenes as well as tearjerker moments. But instead of giant robots, Googins's stakes are the climate crisis, a family as it disintegrates, and a not-so-simple question: What happens after you save the world? It has been 16 years since the Great Transition, the greatest movement in the history of humankind to staunch the end of the world. Humanity has brought the world's carbon emissions to zero, effectively saving the planet. The story revolves around a family--Larch, a hero of the movement who has enjoyed the pleasures of success, and his daughter, Emi, too young to know the true pain of near collapse. ("There was poverty and pandemics and like a thousand people owned everything on the planet. But nobody had any idea what was coming. Not really. It's hard to imagine what it must have felt like. I try.") When Kristina (Larch's wife and Emi's mother) becomes a suspect in the assassination of climate criminals and disappears, it throws their lives into turmoil as they travel to a hurricane-ravaged New York City to find her.
Googins's choices around perspective and time create a visceral reading experience: readers feel the heat as Larch jumps into the fires along the West Coast of the United States and experience the pain as Emi talks about the many ways to "ignite" her mother. Googins has done something brilliant and beautiful in this tender novel, massive in its scope. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle