Review
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A New Statesman Best Book of the Year
“Partly satirical, the book is also an urgent, absorbing story that asks how we are meant to live.”
—The New Yorker
“The narrative toggles back and forth between the tropical island and Willa’s relationship with a Harvard professor. It’s a weird, melancholic adventure novel — not a genre specimen you come across every day.”
—The New York Times
“2022 was an extraordinary year for climate fiction . . . and Allegra Hyde’s Eleutheria was a notable addition. The novel is a propulsive story, braiding together the protagonist’s past relationship with a professor and her current adventure on a tropical island, and deals with activism and idealism. It’s an inventive page-turner that says something the world needs to hear: the catastrophe of climate change is vast, yes, but there’s power in centering solutions–we are not without hope.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“In an absorbing narrative, advanced with memorable characters and scenes, Hyde thinks about the foibles of activists and even the perversity of hope, but never consigns it to the dustbin – as our ancestors were tempted to do so often in the 20th century. We will need that kind of subtlety as our ecological and other crises mount.”
—The New Statesman
“Allegra Hyde’s climate-fiction narrator is the post-cynical heroine we need. . . . Hyde plants all sorts of IEDs in her first novel, shattering her protagonist’s heart, the streets of a decidedly un-United States and, especially, our fragile planetary ecosystem. This is cli-fi even when it turns intimate, with the first kiss between lovers or the failures of addict parents. Individual tensions generate unexpected crackle, but everyone’s caught in the same toxic knots, their environment collapsing around them. The upshot is a first novel way outside the norms: a work of imagination rather than autobiography. . . . Eleutheria achieves a remarkable humanity for a work that sets off global alarms. Hyde knows her title comes from the Greek word for “freedom,” and knows as well that few concepts have been so perverted, so polluted. That maddening paradox enlivens everything here, ‘caught in the slipstream of idealism and exploitation, the secret crux of the Americas.’”
—Los Angeles Times
“Allegra Hyde has a sharp eye for the culture-war chaos and breezy narcissism of modern American life. And enough hope to hint that the youth might (might!) save us from ourselves.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Eleutheria is a stylish, moving entry in the cli-fi canon, thrilling and thoughtful at once.”
—Wired
“There’s lots to love about Willa Marks, the self-styled environmentalist who, at the start of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel, buys a one-way ticket to the Bahamas to join an eco commune, uninvited. She is impulsive, she’s proactive, she’s a believer. But her brand of Ted Lasso can-do damaged idealism, well, it’s a lot. Come to think of it, just about everybody in this swift, slippery novel is kinda sus: Willa’s wannabe influencer cousins, the aloof environmentalists whose party she crashes, their secretive guru leader who — well, nobody trusts a guru. But there’s an infectious strain of hope inside our heroine and throughout this book, that delights even when things get dire.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A climate change novel, yes, but also a tale of searching for hope in dark times.”
—Town & Country
“[A] seductive and propulsive first novel that seeks to challenge our ideas of activism and mobilization in the face of climate change through the story of one woman whose quest for utopia leads to loss and danger, but also an audacious hope for the future.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“A classic story of utopian yearning and collapse, affectingly updated to incorporate present-day concerns about climate change and the erosion of democracy. . . . Willa is a live wire, hurting and causing pain as young people often do. But in an apocalyptic era, her actions have outsized consequences, and the novel finds its most effective theme in portraying utopian idealists like Willa as both dangerous and perhaps essential to begin to address problems so large that they seem unfixable. . . . Eleutheria is a moving meditation on the promise and dangers of utopianism in a potential future plagued by climate change and authoritarianism.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Eleutheria—a word that stems from an ancient Greek term for liberty—is a solid page-turner, made more compelling because the environmental disasters it describes may not be so fictional. . . . Author Allegra Hyde, an award-winning short story writer, can be wonderfully creative with her language.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Exquisite prose and keen insights into the limits of idealism and activism add to the propulsive narrative. This is a worthy entry into the growing field of environmental fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Eleutheria is propulsive, lyrical, and intimate—a book that's deeply invigorating and endlessly thrilling. In a novel that confronts utopias and dystopias, alongside their promises and burdens and the human lives caught in between, Allegra Hyde's prose is both majestic and precise, building a world that's both audaciously complex and wholly inviting. Broaching the question of hope is one of fiction's highest bars, but Hyde's writing deftly navigates this with ease, dazzling and devastating. Eleutheria is an actual light. Allegra Hyde astounds.”
—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
“I was deeply moved, provoked, inspired, and challenged by Eleutheria, an astonishing debut from a truly visionary writer. Willa Marks' audacious hope, and her courageous efforts to unseal the fate of our only home touched me deeply, as did this story's ability to hold so many contradictions within its pages--love and betrayal, dream and nightmare, selfish manipulation and collective action. A book that never gives up on the possibility of kindness and justice without denying the challenges we live with every day, including inside our own hearts and heads.”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories
“Eleutheriais a gorgeous, tender book. What a treat to sit with such beautiful work; to be allowed such an intimate look into how loss can impact not only the human body but also the physical world around us. Allegra Hyde is a dynamic, powerful writer and her first novel is truly something special.”
—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
“There is a heartbreaking negative space to Eleutheria—shades of the world we are in the middle of losing, the world as it will exist only in some future generation’s history books. Extrapolating from our present climate calamity, Allegra Hyde has written something spellbinding at the intersection of arrival and departure, hope and delusion. The complexity of Hyde’s narrator—the warring currents of expectation and abandonment that move her—is a wonderous thing to read.”
—Omar El Akkad, Giller Prize-winning author ofWhat Strange Paradise
“In this superb debut novel, Allegra Hyde creates a singular character in Willa Marks, a troubled young woman whose quest is both hers and ours as she seeks answers to save a dying world. Eleutheria’s timeliness alone is enough to justify a wide and appreciative audience, yet Hyde’s exceptional artistic gifts—especially the complex characters and charged language—make this novel’s urgent concerns all the more powerful.”
—Ron Rash, author of In the Valley
“Eleutheriais gripping, surprising, and full of the poetry of planet Earth. Even as the world seems to be collapsing around Willa Marks, even as she seems to be the only one trying to do anything about it, and even as it becomes clear that even Willa is not to be trusted, the reader thrills to her as a narrator. This book is a marvel. Hyde offers us a perfect terrarium world in which the world's dramas play out so that we might inspect close-up our biggest fears about cycles of hope and violence and progress. So that we might ask ourselves: what is the cost of believing in something, and to whom?”
—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
“My god, can Allegra Hyde write! Eleutheria is a thrilling and utterly transporting novel about survival and hope and the tenacity of love in a dying world. Hyde’s characters are unforgettable, her sentences crystalline. I was surprised and delighted and moved at every turn.”
—Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds
“Allegra Hyde’s visionary first novel is like a terrarium, a small new world made by someone who cares deeply about our survival. To enter it is to glimpse the future and to recognize its layers of dirt and history as our own. But far from being a closed system, everything inside this book—both the ecological disasters and their elegant solutions—is an invitation, radiant with possibility, asking us with love and urgency to change.”
—Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
“Incisive, darkly funny and far-seeing, Allegra Hyde’s Eleutheria interrogates paradise, past and present, communal and individual. Idealistic and yearning, Willa Marks is an unforgettable heroine. A stunning debut.”
—Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City and A River of Stars
“Eleutheria is a twisty, startling tale of climate change and utopia more than worthy of all its ambition. I wept when it was over, for Willa, but also for this mess we’re in—a mess Hyde illuminates with beautiful, affecting prose, bizarre characters that are so completely themselves, and plot twists that shock even as their root is in the inevitability of generations of selfishness. This is a haunting book about reckless, heartbreaking hope.”
—Lydia Conklin, author of Rainbow Rainbow
“Vivid. Wry. Exceptionally clear-sighted. Allegra Hyde’s compelling and timely novel traces the many sides—idealistic, colonial, determined, hopeful—of the eco-utopic compound Camp Hope on Eleutheria.”
—Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere
“Clear-eyed, buoyant, and far-reaching, Eleutheria is a story about the tremulous balance between honesty and pleasure in human life. At once a canny climate novel and a heartbreaking story of love and loss, Hyde's book playfully dodges between the personal and the political while giving full attention to both. I read Eleutheria in one breathless day, and was sorry to leave this world, where our mistakes and tragedies are shown to be as fully human as our most generous dreams.”
—Adrienne Celt, author of End of the World House
“With her captivating novel, Allegra Hyde leads us on a willful, sinuous search for answers in an upended world. Eleutheria is a rallying cry for our collective change of direction.”
—Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain
“Eleutheria is utopian writing at its best and boldest, unflinching in its ideals and unafraid to depict the complexities of people seeking real solutions and taking real actions in the face of the climate crisis. Willa Marks's journey is a powerful, moving tale, told by a master stylist: every sentence Allegra Hyde writes is alive with grace and power and enviable moral clarity."
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
About the Author
Allegra Hyde’s debut story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions,and The Best American Travel Writing. Originally from New Hampshire, she currently lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
My name, my full name, is Willa Marks. There’s nothing in the middle. My parents must have had their reasons for the omission, though I’ve always considered it a sign of honesty. A middle name can lurk in a person like a bomb: a secret identity poised to pop off. I’m simply me.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t have time to tell you anything else. And it’s important for you to hear the truth because what has been said about Camp Hope, about me, is a shadow of what really happened.
Let me start with the easy parts.
I was twenty-two when I boarded a plane and flew to Eleutheria.
I was drunk on ideas.
I was so drunk, in fact, that when the turboprop shuddered into a nosedive—cabin lights flickering, pilot crackling over the intercom—my limbs remained limp. While the other passengers hunched in their seats, prayers on their lips, I kept my eyes open, savoring the rush of arrival, the jarring smack of it reverberating through me.
The turboprop did not land elegantly, but it landed intact. Even so, had the plane crashed onto the island, I’d still have walked out of the wreckage, beatific. I’d been awake the length of a day, a night, and that had not yet become a problem. I was the kind of person who took exhaustion in stride, let it warp my surroundings into dreamscapes. And so far, everything had gone right.
Out the airplane window: palm trees, a heat-seared tarmac, men in orange vests strolling from the steel maw of a rusted aircraft hangar. Around me, a dozen other passengers unbuckled their seat belts. Some smiled relievedly, others wiped away tears. A woman’s purse had spilled into the aisle and I helped her collect her things, though I curbed my impulse to ask if she was from Eleutheria. To get caught in conversation might break whatever spell had whisked me from Boston to the Bahamas, a spell meant to carry me on to Camp Hope. I wanted to arrive unimpeded, unburdened, slick as a fish released into the sea. If I could have, I would have traveled to the island naked. As it was, my backpack contained only a change of clothes, a passport, sixty-five U.S. dollars, and my well-thumbed copy of Living the Solution: The Official Camp Hope Guide to Transforming Ourselves and Saving the Planet.
I had the envelope as well—the one from Sylvia—but I tried not to think about it.
What I thought about was Camp Hope. Specifically, about arriving at Camp Hope and making my life mean something. Had you watched me exit the airplane, my preoccupation would have been obvious. You would have seen a young woman who tripped over her own boots—a size too large—as she entered the hangar. You might have noticed one of my overall cuffs was rolled up higher than the other, that my backpack zipper gaped partially open. Back in Boston, I would have been a person your eyes glazed over on the street: shiftless, among the masses of the newly unemployed. I had an oval face, brittle yellow hair that went dark at the roots, a stub of a nose. I was thin, but not jagged. Scrappy, though in an untested way: like a runaway who has only just left the house, or an actor playing a role. Familiar enough to forget.
In the echoing dimensions of the hangar, however, I stood out. I’d traveled to the island alone and there was no one there to meet me. I had little luggage. I was white and the only person queued in the International Arrivals line. A weary customs agent took my passport, studied it, shrugged. There were no biometric scanners here. Not in this makeshift terminal, arrivals separated from departures by a plastic partition. The original building, like so much else on the island, had been ravaged by hurricanes. Under different circumstances, I might have been made teary-eyed by the scene of my fellow passengers embracing loved ones, opening luggage to reveal supplies from elsewhere—bags of dried rice, baby clothes, phone chargers—but I fixed my attention on the airport exit: a square of sunshine on the far side of the hangar.
I have what you could call a tendency toward fixation. This tendency has been described as childish by some. People have told me, in general, that I have a childlike demeanor. My short stature is partly to blame. Also, my smattering of freckles—though these would multiply, day by day, colonizing my complexion the longer I remained on Eleutheria. I did not have any muscle tone, though that would change as well. I had little coordination. I have only ever been graceful in photos. Pinned under someone else’s gaze, I look best in stillness.
I was not still. Walking with rollicking, over-long strides, I burst out of the hangar into dazzling sunshine. A parking lot shimmered, woozy with heat, its perimeter rimmed by a chain-link fence. In the distance, a narrow highway disappeared into a low swath of scrubland.
My skin burned hot; I had Living the Solution churning inside me and with it the heat of my own ambition. I tended to flush in odd ways—in my fingertips, mostly—though if you’d been watching, this would have been invisible. You would have seen only a pale girl striking out across a parking lot. A lost girl, harmless—or even in harm’s way—easily manipulated. A rube. It was true, my official education extended only through high school, homeschooled at that. But I was not entirely inexperienced. At twenty-two, I’d had my own unusual education. I considered myself intellectually advanced in one significant way: I was too wise for cynicism. I had outsmarted doubt.
No one at Camp Hope knew I was coming. No one would know who I was when I arrived. I maintained, nevertheless, a propulsive confidence. Reaching the edge of the parking lot, I started down the side of the highway, soaking in sunshine, electrifying my body, intending only to move closer to my destination—a place in my head, rather than direct view—so that, if you’d been watching, you might have seen my eyes go unfocused, my chin lift, my chest tugged forward by an invisible string.
Someone was watching. A pickup truck trailed me out of the parking lot and onto the highway. There were four men in the truck: two in the front and two in the back. The pair in the back wore sun-faded T-shirts that billowed in the breeze, their arms stretched along the edges of the truck bed. The man in the passenger seat wore an orange vest, as if he’d just stepped off the airport tarmac. The driver was obscured.
I kept walking and the truck kept rolling, until the man in the orange vest called: You a surfer? Or—
A fugitive? interrupted a man in the back.
There was laughter, but I didn’t care—I didn’t even break stride. In my mind’s eye, my destination glittered: an ecoparadise, a pragmatic arcadia, an answer to the problem that had haunted me my whole life.
Are you lost? said the man in the orange vest.
Though I’d barely spoken for a day and a half, my answer burst forth, bell-like and bright: I’m going to Camp Hope.
The truck stopped rolling. The men’s laughter ceased. I continued on, unperturbed, reciting lines from Living the Solution beneath my breath, swinging my arms as I walked the ragged edge of the highway.
Ten minutes later, the truck again rumbled alongside me. All the men had gotten out except the driver. He leaned across the passenger seat, his face visible for the first time. He was handsome in a plaintive way, his eyes half-closed, his jawline shadowed by a beard, his dreadlocks pulled behind his head. He asked if I was really going to Camp Hope.
Sure am, I said.
Camp Hope is far, far from here, he said.
I can manage, I said—though in truth it was hotter than seemed possible for the month of May. Only squat palms and brambly foliage stretched before me, with no sign of a settlement or even the sea, save for the wheeling arc of a gull overhead.
Also, said the driver, you’re walking the wrong way.
He told me to let him give me a ride. He said he didn’t mind, speaking in a tenor of nonchalance I should have perhaps recognized as forced. He was, in fact, keenly interested in what I had to say and where I was going. Deron was his name. For a long time I was angry at him, given what would happen later on, though my feelings have since changed. I hope Deron is well and happy wherever he is now, even if—in his own way and for his own reasons—he did make everything more complicated.
The truck roared down the highway, wind slicing into the cabin through the open windows. I might have remained quiet, watched the landscape blur past, convinced an invisible current was carrying me closer to Camp Hope—but of course, that was not what was happening. That was not happening at all.
The truck cabin was cramped and Deron was tall, yet he maintained a casual posture, except where his hand clenched the stick shift. The grip meant little to me; I hadn’t spent much time in trucks and didn’t know anything about driving them. What I noticed was that Deron had used an elastic tie with pink plastic beads—the kind little girls wear—to gather his hair. This made me like him. When he asked my name, I told him.
I’m Willa, I said. Willa Marks.
Out the windows: scrubland sprawled in every direction, except for a tumbledown gas station, plywood fixed over one window like a pirate eye patch. Further on, a worn sign indicated an upcoming settlement.
Willa Marks, said Deron, you don’t look like the Camp Hope type.
I’m exactly the type, I said.
Deron nodded with exaggerated slowness. The truck rumbled into a small community comprised of cinder-block homes painted pastel pinks, yellows, teals with white trim. A group of men watched the truck pass from the shade of a garage. A lone woman, scowling, sat beside a spread of cucumbers, tomatoes, and papayas. Farther on, a pair of children dangled from a swing set. Chickens skittered into the brush.
Deron repeated my name to himself, as if trying to remember where we had met, and for the first time on my journey, I felt uneasy. I did not like hearing my name said aloud, chanted like a password to a history I’d forgotten.
Willa, Willa, Willa. What does that mean—Willaaaa?
I shrugged. My mother once told me she named me Willa because there was a willow in her front yard growing up: a tree everyone thinks of as peaceful, with its long droopy branches, thin leaves. Really, it’s a ferocious tree, with roots spreading underground, fingering the foundations of houses, bubbling up the asphalt of driveways. I never quite believed my mother, though. If she had admired the tree so much, why hadn’t she named me Willow? Now she was too dead to ask.
Why don’t I look like the Camp Hope type? I said.
A smile hitched one side of Deron’s mouth. As if he hadn’t heard my question, he said he had an interest in names. He asked if I knew the meaning of the island’s name—Eleutheria— his accent smoothing off vowels at the beginning and the end of the word, the way ocean water smooths down glass, making me feel a little seasick, storm-tossed too. He started talking about the island’s history. There’d been a shipwreck, religious colonists. My attention drifted. Out the truck window, confectionary-colored houses gave way to abandoned buildings, vines snaking their walls. Beyond them lay piles of twisted metal, roofs displaced from their frames. A rowboat’s rotting stern crested a wave of fruit pods in the branches of a tamarind tree. This part of the island had been hard-hit by hurricanes.
