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PAST READS > June 2025 BOTM: The Deluge by Stephen Markley

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message 1: by Steve (last edited May 07, 2025 11:29PM) (new) - rated it 2 stars

Steve Shelby | 359 comments Mod
June 2025 BOTM in the new category—published within the last 10 years:

The Deluge by Stephen Markley (2023)
The Deluge by Stephen Markley Stephen Markley

Publisher's Summary
From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.


message 2: by Steve (last edited May 07, 2025 11:31PM) (new) - rated it 2 stars

Steve Shelby | 359 comments Mod
He is introducing characters somethin’ fierce. Kind of gets into that intimately in a figurative sense, developing their character a bit. Then he moves on to the next character. When is the story itself going to start? He is up there with Clancy in taking a damn while to get a story going. 5 hours in and I think he has touched one character twice, and not gotten the story off the ground.

And, it’s a climate change catastrophe story, … in America, … so … some American politics are bandied about here and there.


Steve Shelby | 359 comments Mod
Losing faith. This author is all about character development, and not at all about an actual story involving these characters. If I get to 10 hours, and the story has still not materialized in any interesting way, I’m bailing.


Steve Shelby | 359 comments Mod
Nope. Throwing in the towel at 11:22 in, with no story really surfacing yet other than climate change is a thing they are struggling with.


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