The debut novel from the multi-award winning author: six very different characters each have their lives altered by a tweet, a storm, a revelation – and a secret in one of their pasts.
What brings six very different people together? Fiona is a millennial media writer; Sidney a failed poet; Tomas a thirty-something factory worker and father; Lexi a fading activist icon; Govita a non-binary visual artist; Henry a Vietnam veteran ageing out in rural isolation. On the face of it, they have nothing in common – but when a tweet goes viral, it sends their lives ricocheting off each other and upending their assumptions about each other, the world they live in, their pasts and their futures.
Following her acclaimed collection of stories, Women I Know, Katerina Gibson’s debut novel demonstrates her extraordinary range of sympathy and interest. Compelling and discursive, ironic and serious, compassionate and ethically rigorous, The Temperature describes our fragmented society as it tries to absorb the significance of climate change, social media, shifting boundaries in gender and sexuality, and deepening gaps between generations. The Temperature is about whether we can learn, personally and collectively; about the cyclical nature of grief, catastrophe and revelation. It is a novel about how we might live through the end of the world.
A contemporary equivalent of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity or Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, The Temperature marks Katerina Gibson out as one of the most ambitious, engaging and significant of our emerging writers.
