Children of Tomorrow

Children of Tomorrow is an episodic saga, a sweeping history of family and friendship, spanning multiple generations and geographies across the twenty-first century.

This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change. Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer's bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, where they are both enrolled in a PhD, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.

Children of Tomorrow depicts an all-too-real future history, rushing on at an unstoppable speed and fracturing the lives of its many characters, the effects of which ripple throughout subsequent generations and the earth they inherit.

'With echoes of Kim Stanley Robinson, James Bradley and Richard Powers, JR Burgmann provides a lyrical catalogue of the terrifying crises to come. If you're waiting for a hero to save us, Children of Tomorrow is a timely reminder that climate change is caused by a complex network of people, and that collective action and diverse approaches are our only way out of this.' —Jane Rawson

'a pre-emptive elegy to our world as it spins through the 21st century into what could conceivably be the human race's endgame… This novel doesn't pull its punches but does, ultimately, nail its colours to the mast of that most persistent and valuable of all human commodities: hope.' —Paul Dalgarno