Eleutheria
Willa Marks has spent her whole life choosing hope. She chooses hope over her parents’ paranoid conspiracy theories, over her dead-end job, over the rising ocean levels. And when she meets Sylvia Gill, renowned Harvard professor, she feels she’s found the justification of that hope. Sylvia is the woman-in-black: The only person smart and sharp enough to compel the world to action. But when Sylvia betrays her, Willa fears she has lost hope forever.
And then she finds a book in Sylvia's library: a guide to fighting climate change called "Living the Solution." Inspired by its message and with nothing to lose, Willa flies to the island of Eleutheria in the Bahamas to join the author and his group of ecowarriors at Camp Hope. Upon arrival, things are not what she expected. The group’s leader, author Roy Adams, is missing, and the compound’s public launch is delayed. With time running out, Willa will stop at nothing to realize Camp Hope's mission — but at what cost?
Bio
Allegra Hyde’s debut story collection, "Of This New World," won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Originally from New Hampshire, she graduated in 2015 from the ASU MFA program in creative writing. Hyde currently lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Praise for this book
Allegra Hyde’s seductive first novel tackles the big stuff of climate change and the more intimate matter of heartbreak with grace. Indeed, Eleutheria bravely braids these together, the story of a lost soul moving through the world we’re rapidly losing.
Rumaan Alam Author of "Leave the World Behind"
Eleutheria is propulsive, lyrical, and intimate — a book that's deeply invigorating and endlessly thrilling. In a novel that confronts utopias and dystopias, alongside their promises and burdens and the human lives caught in between, Allegra Hyde's prose is both majestic and precise, building a world that's both audaciously complex and wholly inviting. Broaching the question of hope is one of fiction's highest bars, but Hyde's writing deftly navigates this with ease, dazzling and devastating. Eleutheria is an actual light. Allegra Hyde astounds.
Bryan Washington Author of "Memorial"
