Elyse is an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid is a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. When the seemingly fulfilling lives of these distanced childhood friends are shaken, everything they’ve carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. This outer unraveling mirrors a growing discomfort with their safe lives. For Elyse, it begins with a mundane moment at the grocery store and a news story about polar bears. For Astrid, it happens during a faculty reception where a visiting lecturer’s talk sparks a rift with her mentor and father figure.
 
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
 
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crises in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
 
 

Marybeth Holleman was raised by North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains and lives in the embrace of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. She’s the author of tender gravity: poems, The Heart of the Sound, coauthor of Among Wolves, and coeditor of Crosscurrents North, among others. She’s also coeditor of the forthcoming A Poetic and Artistic Field Guide to Alaska. Her award-winning work appears in over fifty venues including Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, North American Review, Zoomorphic, and The Guardian. She has held artist residencies in such diverse places as Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, Ninfa, Denali National Park, and Tracy Arm Ford’s Terror Wilderness. She transplanted to Alaska after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound just two years before the oil spill. When she’s not kayaking those beloved fjords, she’s following her wild huskies up and down Alaska’s mountains.