{"product_id":"blue-skies-a-novel","title":"Blue Skies A Novel By Boyle, T.c.","description":"Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiance, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brilliantly imaginative . . . in a terrifying way” (Annie Proulx), \u003cem\u003eBlue Skies\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut 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 massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, \u003cem\u003eBlue Skies\u003c\/em\u003e deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s \u003cem\u003eBlue Skies\u003c\/em\u003e is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57820878438782,"sku":"NW9781324095187","price":8.57,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9781324095187.jpg?v=1786178151","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/blue-skies-a-novel","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}