Sea Now

A book on what happens when the delicate balance of nature tips in favor of the sea

The catastrophe that everyone knew was coming has arrived—the dykes are breached, the tideline rises a kilometer a day, and the citizens of the Netherlands are forced into gyms and shelters in Germany and Belgium. The foxes and rabbits head inland across the dunes. The politicians make empty speeches and fret the optics. The Hague—“the center of peace and justice”—slips beneath the rising water. Online retailers do flash sale promotions on disaster kits. There is violence and looting, but some people are too tired to start over again and simply walk into the rising tide.

Not willing to simply move on, three women get into a small boat and ride back out over the flooded cities, looking for loved ones they know are likely drowned. On the way, they witness a world retaken by seabirds, whales, and kelp forests. The sea has spoken, and there’s nothing left to be done but listen.

Philosopher and cross-species linguist Eva Meijer’s new novel redefines both nature writing and climate fiction by bringing the power and resilience of the natural world to the fore.

Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. Her fiction and nonfiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Since the publication of her first novel in 2011, her works have been receiving numerous awards, including the Halewijnprijs honouring her oeuvre. Her books have been met enthusiastically by the Dutch but also international press including reviews in The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Review of Books. Recurring themes are language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. Meijer also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University. She writes essays and columns for NRC newspaper, and is a member of the Multispecies Art Collective.

Anne Thompson Melo studied Dutch and German at Hull and wrote a PhD on GDR children’s literature whilst living in the GDR, Germany and Austria. Since then, she has worked as a commercial translator, based in Edinburgh. She was longlisted for the John Dryden Translation Prize in 2022 and shortlisted for the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation in 2023. Winning the 2024 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize gave her the opportunity to work on her first literary translation