Blue Skies: A Novel

**"Boyle’s satire has lost none of its edge over the course of a nearly half-century literary career . . . [ *Blue Skies* is] an expert blend of suspense, terror and, occasionally, very black humor . . . this fiercely honest writer shows us what he sees and invites his readers to draw their own conclusions." —Wendy Smith, *Washington Post***
From best-selling novelist T. C. Boyle, a satirical yet ultimately moving send-up of contemporary American life in the glare of climate change.
“Boyle has long been one of the most exciting and intelligent storytellers in the United States.” **—Ron Charles, *Washington Post***
Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.
“Brilliantly imaginative . . . in a terrifying way” (Annie Proulx), *Blue Skies* follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, *Blue Skies* deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”
An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s *Blue Skies* is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”