The Coral Bones is out now and copies are starting to make their way into readers’ hands. I’m absolutely delighted that the novel has been included in The Guardian’s September science fiction round up, which described it as a ‘thoughtful, immersive, very human story that speaks to current fears and hopes for our world’.

Early on in my research for the book, I read Dr Charlie Veron’s A Reef in Time and discovered that corals have evolved and become extinct several times through the history of life on earth.

Thinking about deep time in the face of the sheer pace and scale of environmental change today is one of the many dissonances I grappled with over the course of writing The Coral Bones. I started working on the novel in 2016, after a mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in the same year. A second bleaching event followed in 2017. Even six years ago, events like the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia and the flooding crisis in Pakistan today would have seemed like horrors from a distant future. Climate breakdown is accelerating at a rate that is terrifying, overwhelming and at times paralysing. 

It’s no surprise, then, that writers are increasingly engaging with this theme. Books may not save us but perhaps they can help us process. When I was developing what would become The Osiris Project series over a decade ago, there didn’t seem to be many novels which were engaging directly with climate breakdown (Alexis Wright’s extraordinary The Swan Book, published in 2013, remains a touchstone work for me). Today there is a proliferation of superb novels and non-fiction exploring both climate and the biodiversity crisis, and climate anxiety haunts the backgrounds of many more.

Coral science and conservation is likewise continually evolving and in 2018 the world lost a brilliant and much loved coral scientist in Dr Ruth Gates, who died at age 56. Hana’s storyline in The Coral Bones is based upon research on human-assisted coral evolution pioneered by Dr Gates and Professor Madeleine van Oppen (any errors in the book are, of course, my own). Attending the Reef Conservation UK conference in December 2018, it was clear how much Dr Gates had meant to the community. I never had the privilege of meeting or speaking with Dr Gates but her words have been a huge inspiration for this novel; a quote from an interview she gave in Irus Braverman’s Coral Whisperers – Scientists on the Brink will always stay with me: ‘Coral reefs are my cathedral’. Dr Gates was also interviewed in the Netflix documentary Chasing Corals and I would recommend this – along with David Attenborough’s BBC documentary series on the Great Barrier Reef – to anyone interested in finding out more about corals. I owe a huge thank you to Dr Jamie Craggs, who showed me around the Project Coral laboratories at the Horniman Museum’s Aquarium in London. Amazing work is being done there and Dr Craggs’s research gave me an invaluable insight into the world of coral science.

Writing a novel can be a lonely path but the production of a book is very much a collaboration. This book would not have been possible without the support and belief of my partner, friends and family, my agent Margaret Halton and the marvellous people at Unsung Stories. It is often said that writing is a labour of love but so too is publishing in so many cases. I’ve been very lucky to have five novels published now and publication is always a mix of euphoria and terror. The timescales with an independent press also run much tighter to publication, so having been working on the book right up to a few months ago, the material feels closer than ever.

In many ways, since its genesis The Coral Bones has been overtaken by events. But the themes it explores come from a lifelong love of nature, and the hope, however frail and ephemeral it sometimes seems, that there is still time to turn things around. Books have a role to play here, I think, and I am grateful for the solace and inspiration found in the words of so many other writers. 

So it’s now time to let the book go. I hope The Coral Bones can make a contribution to the wider, critical conversations about what is happening to our shared home. For anyone reading – I hope you find something in the stories of Hana, Judith and Telma that speaks to you.

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You can find The Coral Bones via bookshops and retailers including:

Unsung Stories // Waterstones // Forbidden Planet // Amazon.co.uk

THE CORAL BONES

Three women: divided by time, connected by the ocean.

Marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is racing against time to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, but struggles to fight for a future in a world where so much has already been lost.

Seventeen-year-old Judith Holliman escapes the monotony of Sydney Town during the nineteenth century, when her naval captain father lets her accompany him on a voyage, unaware of the wonders and dangers she will soon encounter.

Telma Velasco is hunting for a miracle in a world ravaged by global heating: a leafy seadragon, long believed extinct, has been sighted. But as Telma investigates, she finds hope in unexpected places.

Past, present and future collide in this powerful elegy to a disappearing world – and vision of a more hopeful future.