Australia is ‘further along the trajectory of climate grief’ than most other countries, according to Irish author Caoilinn Hughes, who says this may be one reason her latest novel The Alternatives has received a good reception here.

Hughes was in Sydney ahead of her appearance at the Byron Bay Writers Festival (August 9-11).

Her clear-eyed intelligence, gentle humour and great gift for storytelling shone through during an illuminating interview with Australian author Bri Lee (Eggshell Skull, Who Gets to Be Smart, The Work) on August 6 in a Roaring Stories bookshop event held at Balmain’s White Bay Brewery.

Set in Ireland, Hughes’ novel features four sisters who were orphaned young and are now in their thirties, each responding in her own way to the climate crisis.

Olwen, an earth scientist, is wracked with despair and walks away from her life and loved ones. Maeve, a chef and YouTube sensation, wants to chart a way forward through sustainable food and education.

Rhona, a political scientist and talking head, is trying to change the political system through fostering citizens’ assemblies. And Nell, a philosopher, is throwing herself into her lectures and into understanding her purpose, interconnections and agency in the world.

Nell was the youngest of the siblings when their parents died and Olwen, the oldest, became responsible for the girls’ upbringing. Of the effect of this shift on Nell, Hughes said, ‘Being brought up by Olwen leaves you very few skills to prepare you for the apocalypse’.

Hughes said she loved the idea that her book about sisters could also be a book about a geologist, a philosopher, a political scientist, and a chef – all who do meaningful work and whose family connection extends beyond the realm of the domestic.

As Rhona explains: ‘My child isn’t some hobby I attend to after clocking out intellectually. He’s not the nonwork part of my life. I don’t want to dedicate my day to something Leo isn’t part of. A baby is serious intellectual work, Maeve. Not the enemy of scholarship or promise.’

Hughes also spoke of how she ‘tried not to write this book for so long’ due to its challenging themes; wrote the novel in windswept and geologically significant Connemara on the West Coast of Ireland; gave some of her own pathologies to her characters; used the novel to explore deep time and the difficulty of loving a climate scientist; and wanted to show how little we know of our families and how a return to the family realm can mean much of our life lived outside the family ‘gets collapsed’ and rendered invisible.

The Flattery sisters come together on a stormy night in County Leitrim, after three of them take time out from their careers to search for Olwen, who has gone missing. When they eventually find her, she’s quite tetchy that they’ve pursued her.

We learn more from a discussion about eggs why Olwen is so prickly and what a burden an ‘ultra-awareness’ of the climate emergency can be.

‘Olwen shook her head. If I tell her [the woman who brings Olwen eggs] I don’t eat them, the innocent question why could follow; or maybe she looked me up, and saw Earth Science, and then it can be as little as one move to the question, Do you have hope? … And then you’ve to calibrate how long they have to listen, what they know, how much you’re willing to poison them.’

Ultra-awareness may be poisonous, but Hughes insists there’s also consolation to be found in facing up to the moment we’re living in.

The Alternatives is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’

The Alternatives is also a moving story about sisters who are charting their own paths during difficult times (i.e., right now in the Anthropocene). In reuniting, they’re reminded of the love they share, the importance of care and the value of community.

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The Alternatives
Caoilinn Hughes
Bloomsbury Publishing, $32.99