Eleutheria

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
A NEW YORKER* BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

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**

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?

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

“Allegra Hyde has a sharp eye for the culture-war chaos and breezy narcissism of modern American life. And enough hope to hint that the youth might (might!) save us from ourselves.”
 —Entertainment Weekly
 
“[A] seductive and propulsive first novel that seeks to challenge our ideas of activism and mobilization in the face of climate change through the story of one woman whose quest for utopia leads to loss and danger, but also an audacious hope for the future.”
 —Chicago Review of Books

“A classic story of utopian yearning and collapse, affectingly updated to incorporate present-day concerns about climate change and the erosion of democracy. . . . Willa is a live wire, hurting and causing pain as young people often do. But in an apocalyptic era, her actions have outsized consequences, and the novel finds its most effective theme in portraying utopian idealists like Willa as both dangerous and perhaps essential to begin to address problems so large that they seem unfixable. . . . Eleutheria is a moving meditation on the promise and dangers of utopianism in a potential future plagued by climate change and authoritarianism.”
 —Shelf Awareness
 
“Exquisite prose and keen insights into the limits of idealism and activism add to the propulsive narrative. This is a worthy entry into the growing field of environmental fiction.”
 —Publishers Weekly

“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

“I was deeply moved, provoked, inspired, and challenged by Eleutheria, an astonishing debut from a truly visionary writer. Willa Marks' audacious hope, and her courageous efforts to unseal the fate of our only home touched me deeply, as did this story's ability to hold so many contradictions within its pages--love and betrayal, dream and nightmare, selfish manipulation and collective action. A book that never gives up on the possibility of kindness and justice without denying the challenges we live with every day, including inside our own hearts and heads.”
 —Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories

“Eleutheria* is a gorgeous, tender book. What a treat to sit with such beautiful work; to be allowed such an intimate look into how loss can impact not only the human body but also the physical world around us. Allegra Hyde is a dynamic, powerful writer and her first novel is truly something special.”
Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth*

“There is a heartbreaking negative space to Eleutheria—shades of the world we are in the middle of losing, the world as it will exist only in some future generation’s history books. Extrapolating from our present climate calamity, Allegra Hyde has written something spellbinding at the intersection of arrival and departure, hope and delusion. The complexity of Hyde’s narrator—the warring currents of expectation and abandonment that move her—is a wonderous thing to read.”
 —Omar El Akkad, Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise

“In this superb debut novel, Allegra Hyde creates a singular character in Willa Marks, a troubled young woman whose quest is both hers and ours as she seeks answers to save a dying world. Eleutheria’s timeliness alone is enough to justify a wide and appreciative audience, yet Hyde’s exceptional artistic gifts—especially the complex characters and charged language—make this novel’s urgent concerns all the more powerful.” 
—Ron Rash, author of *In the Valley

“Eleutheria* is gripping, surprising, and full of the poetry of planet Earth. Even as the world seems to be collapsing around Willa Marks, even as she seems to be the only one trying to do anything about it, and even as it becomes clear that even Willa is not to be trusted, the reader thrills to her as a narrator. This book is a marvel. Hyde offers us a perfect terrarium world in which the world's dramas play out so that we might inspect close-up our biggest fears about cycles of hope and violence and progress. So that we might ask ourselves: what is the cost of believing in something, and to whom?” 
—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“My god, can Allegra Hyde write! Eleutheria is a thrilling and utterly transporting novel about survival and hope and the tenacity of love in a dying world. Hyde’s characters are unforgettable, her sentences crystalline. I was surprised and delighted and moved at every turn.”
—Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds

“Allegra Hyde’s visionary first novel is like a terrarium, a small new world made by someone who cares deeply about our survival. To enter it is to glimpse the future and to recognize its layers of dirt and history as our own. But far from being a closed system, everything inside this book—both the ecological disasters and their elegant solutions—is an invitation, radiant with possibility, asking us with love and urgency to change.”
—Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“Incisive, darkly funny and far-seeing, Allegra Hyde’s Eleutheria interrogates paradise, past and present, communal and individual. Idealistic and yearning, Willa Marks is an unforgettable heroine. A stunning debut.”
—Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City and A River of Stars

“Eleutheria is a twisty, startling tale of climate change and utopia more than worthy of all its ambition. I wept when it was over, for Willa, but also for this mess we’re in—a mess Hyde illuminates with beautiful, affecting prose, bizarre characters that are so completely themselv…