My Volcano

- Blurb -

One morning a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, that three weeks later will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world. My Volcano is a pre-apocalyptic vision following a cast of characters experiencing private and collective eruptions: a boy in Mexico City finds himself 500 years in the past; a scholar in Tokyo studies a story about a woman coming down a mountain to destroy villages; a trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilisation on an impossible planet; a nurse works with Syrian refugees in Greece as she tries to grapple with the trauma of surviving an American bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan; a nomadic herder in Mongolia finds himself transformed into a thorned, flowering creature trying to assimilate every living thing on Earth into its consciousness. ' With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin' s Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer' s Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi' s My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn' t let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line. - Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground' A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that' s both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed. ' - Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian)' My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions. ' - Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig