[11] Denial by Jon Raymond

BOOK: Denial
AUTHOR: Jon Raymond
YEAR: 2022
PUBLISHER: Simon and Schuster

It is 2052. Though the planet was not spared all the destructive impacts of climate change, humanity has finally kicked its fossil fuel addiction. This is thanks to the global protest movement The Upheavals twenty years earlier and the subsequent Toronto Trials that convicted most of the world’s oil executives and lobbyists for their environmental crimes. Not all the oil criminals were caught, however. Pipeline mastermind Robert Cave is one of the executives who escaped capture and is presently in hiding. Journalist Jack Henry gets a tip as to Cave’s whereabouts and sets out from the Pacific Northwest to Mexico to investigate.

The eleventh book in the LAX LAB climate fiction book club is Jon Raymond’s futuristic thriller Denial. The novel asks big questions about climate justice and about how we understand our mortality on a dying planet. I hope that you will enjoy this change of pace page-turner, which has been described as a "speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we live".

THEMES
Climate justice
Fossil fuels
Global climate movement
Media
Protest

REFERENCES
‘What folklore tells us about eclipses’
James Deutsch, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 August 2017

’13 ways of looking at Denial: Jon Raymond on the artistic inspiration behind his novel’
Jon Raymond, Literary Hub, 25 August 2022