The Displacements

"A gripping, full-throttle page turner."– Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna--the world’s first category 6 hurricane--upends everything they have taken for granted. When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will “normal” ever return? A< <suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, <The Displacements <thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

*Praise for The Displacements*:&#160;

“A riveting and humbling reminder of how precarious our lives are in comparison to the power of nature, and a profound glimpse into our near future.”– Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes**

“Realistic and immediate, it puts the reader right in the eye of the emotional storm, alongside its characters. As much as this is a wake-up call about the unpredictable nature of weather and life, it is most powerfully a propulsive family drama and a provocative story of human dignity, human indignity, and the deeper meanings of home.” **– Miranda Cowley Heller, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Paper Palace**

“Bruce Holsinger has written a novel that succeeds in confronting the shocking realities of these times without being either apocalyptic or pessimistic. The Displacements is an urgent, powerful, unputdownable novel, filled with characters that are so vividly drawn that it is impossible not to care about them. A remarkable achievement.” – Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable**

Autorentext

Bruce Holsinger

Klappentext

*“Hypnotic.” – New York Times*

“Cinematic.” – *USA Today

*"I gripped the covers of this book as though it might be blown from my hands. . .powerful." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post**

"A full-throttle page turner."– Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe
**
To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna—the world’s first category 6 hurricane—upends everything they have taken for granted.
&#160;
When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush&#160;of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will “normal” ever return?
&#160;
A suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, The Displacements thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

Leseprobe
1.

Shortly after sunrise, a squall off the Gambian coast joins a rank of thunderheads crowning miles into the stratosphere. Dueling systems, two storms converging where the Canary Current dips to meet the North Atlantic Equatorial. A play of lightning and sheeting rain roils the ocean waters. Whitecaps foam the crests of waves.

Late the same morning, from the south and the scattered islands of the&#160;Bijagós&#160;archipelago, another storm edges in. Lower, more tempestuous in its churnings. The third system carries warmer waters beneath its front. The storms mingle and convect, a cycling dance of sea, sky, and rain.

Hundreds of miles to the south-southeast, the father-son crew of a fishing charter off Cape Verde help a banker from Lisbon struggle a blue marlin to the deck. Once the fish is stowed in ice below, the three clients arrange themselves along the gunwales, swilling coffee from foam cups while the craft rides the swells.

Without warning, a heavy gust sweeps the deck, wrenching cups into the sea, slamming one of the men against the superstructure. The other two clients share a good laugh at their companion's expense.
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The captain and his son trade looks. A subtle wag of the father's beard. When you've fished the countercurrents for going on thirty years you know a thing when you smell it. The pressure rises in your bones and bends the invisible air. Even the son knows what this new sea means.
Another hour, two at most, then it's all out for&#160;São&#160;Vicente. The Lisboans will not be pleased.

The gathering storms fuse and collide. For hours the system remains loose, a disturbance in the Atlantic weather pattern.
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Deep within a high cloud there is a shift in the convection flow and a modification in vertical temperature variation. The system organizes the warms, rallies the winds, until, as one, the three storms accelerate and spin.

A slow cyclonic spiral 108 nautical miles north of the equator. The rotation is counterclockwise. By 4:00 p.m. Gambian time, the satellites have captured enough data to effect a change in status. The system upgrades to a tropical depression, drawing more eyes to weather screens in the Caribbean islands, along the eastern seaboard of the Americas.
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Five hours later, the depression has matured into a tropical storm. She spins and strengthens until she is hale enough to earn a name.

She is Luna.

2.

She spins and pedals and turns the clay mound until a cylinder rises in her hands. With four fingers in the mouth and a sponge on the shoulder she lightens the walls, creating form. The glaze will be an aquamarine, one of twelve shades Daphne and her Key West client have selected for the installation, a spectrum of blue-green hues inspired by the client's love of the Caribbean Sea. Six finished vessels already line a shelf and gather the sunlight brimming off the lagoon. Today Daphne has been working on the seventh, but each time she pulls, something goes wrong. Too much water, a flinch of the hand. Some unseen flaw in the clay.

She pinches along the neck ring so the mouth floats above the body, creating a slight pressure with only her pinkie engaged, to the edge of what the thickness can withstand. The wall thins, goes thinner still-

Too much, and the neck collapses into the base. She rams the sponge down through the upper walls until a shapeless lump sits on the bat. She pulls it off and slams it into the reclaim bin.
Cricket, alarmed, cranes up from her bed. "It's okay, girl." The beagle mutt lowers her patchy head, brown eyes moist with concern.

Daphne stretches on her stool and breathes in the earthy air of her studio, a high-ceilinged room flooded with ligh…