Eleutheria

Congratulations to past contributor Allegra Hyde, who has a book forthcoming in 2022! The novel, Eleutheria, will be published by Vintage in March and is available for pre-order from a number of sellers.

Eleutheria follows Willa Marks, a young woman who never abandons hope despite the multitude of hopeless things in her life: her parents’ belief in conspiracy theories, a job with no future, and rising seas. Then she meets Harvard professor Sylvia Gill, who first validates Willa’s endless hope, but then threatens to destroys it after she betrays her. In the wake of Sylvia’s betrayal, Willa discovers in Sylvia’s library Living the Solution, a guide to fighting climate change. Inspired and with nothing holding her back, she jets off to an island in the Bahamas called Eleutheria to meet the author and join him at Camp Hope. But the group of activists she finds at Camp Hope is not at all what she expected: the leader is missing and the compound isn’t ready to go public. Willa is left to decide: how far will she go to support Camp Hope?

In the book’s own words, Eleutheria is “a story of idealism, activism, and systemic corruption, centered on a naïve young woman’s quest for agency in a world ravaged by climate change.” Knowing SR is housed at ASU, Allegra added: “I started writing the novel while I was at the university. While Eleutheria doesn’t take place in Arizona, living in the state – especially in the Phoenix area – exposes a person to some pretty extreme weather, and this informed some of my thinking about climate change, which is central to the novel.”

Allegra’s essay “Things I Don’t Tell My Mother” appeared in Issue 12 and she was interviewed for Issue 18. She is also the author of a story collection, Of This New World. To learn more about Allegra, visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Congratulations, Allegra!