Blue Skies, T.C. Boyle
Blue Skies, T.C. Boyle
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Blue Skies

Author: T.C. Boyle

Narrator: Alyssa Bresnahan

Unabridged: 15 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/16/2023


Synopsis

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening,
writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans.
But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from
a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and
outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.
“Brilliantly imaginative … in a terrifying way” (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the
tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit
and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in
contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America,
where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie
and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—
are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters
happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the
banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve
normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist
American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. From pet
bees and cricket-dependent diets to species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies
deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in
which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”
An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient
novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”

Author Bio

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

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