Every Wild Soul (Katherine Johnson, HarperCollins)
Eco-literature has been booming in recent years, thanks largely to writers including James Bradley, Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood and Donna Cameron. Winner of the inaugural Australian Fiction Prize, Katherine Johnson’s Every Wild Soul is an expansive and engrossing work that fits comfortably into this category, exploring themes of climate change, environmental degradation, habitat loss and species extinction. Written in prose that is by turns sinuous and achingly precise, Johnson (Paris Savages, The Better Son) focuses the narrative primarily on 18-year-old Miranda, known as “Min”, who has grown up in near-isolation on Tasmania’s Maria Island with her controlling ranger father. Forbidden to make friends her own age, or to own a mobile phone, she has formed a close friendship with Werner, a gruff German taxonomist who also lives on the island. She accompanies him on his fieldwork to discover and catalogue new species and uses her artistic abilities to illustrate the creatures they find. Interwoven with Min’s story is that of Lucie, an Australian journalist in London, writing about international rewilding projects. She meets Min and Werner when she visits Maria Island to write about a Tasmanian devil conservation project and finds herself drawn into their tiny, close-knit community. Every Wild Soul balances a careful exploration of human emotions and relationships with environmental issues, resulting in a novel that is as much about the human tensions between progress and preservation as it is about the environmental ones. For readers who enjoyed Robbie Arnott’s Dusk and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things.
Books+Publishing reviewer: Heidi Maier has a PhD in women's studies and literature. She has been an arts and literary writer and reviewer for more than 20 years. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.
Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews
