Frankie's TOP 5 in 2025 | Under the Eye of the Big Bird - Hiromi Kawakami

Frankie says... A beautiful meditation on human life and the climate consequences we're facing. The novel IS a novel, not a collection of short stories, as Kawakami asks you to look beyond Formalist ideas of scale. Climate fiction at its best - unflinching, cerebral and ephemeral, but with enough grit and humanity to keep it tethered. Kawakami's writing floats off the page - this is her writing on full thrust, utterly beguiling! 

--

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.