Synopsis:

There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to the Morningside.

After being expelled from their ancestral home, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City where Silvia’s aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family’s past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia’s lonely and impoverished reality.

Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building. She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.

Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell—and the stories we refuse to tell—to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.

Shortlisted for The Climate Fiction Prize

Genre: Dystopian Magical Realism
Publisher: Random House
Pub Date: 19 March 2024

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Review:

Silvia and her mother are fleeing from their homeland after environmental and political catastrophe and join a repopulation scheme in a city half-underwater. They find themselves living in a decaying high-rise called ‘The Morningside’ with Silvia’s aunt Ena, who happens to be the superintendent there. Ena tells Silvia folktales from their past and, enchanted by these, Silvia grows convinced that a wealthy woman living in the penthouse is actually a sorceress and is determined to find out the truth about her.

This was a funny book for me – there was a lot I liked and some things I wasn’t sure about. The conversation around climate change was excellently done and I liked Silvia as a character, but the ‘magical’ elements of the story didn’t quite work for me. They felt too vague and childlike, and while I know Silvia was a child, it just didn’t fit quite right into the rest of the story.

As we follow the story through young Silvia’s eyes, the realities of the climate-destroyed world she lives in sit in the background as children are, of course, usually preoccupied with other things. We get hints of it through watching her mother work as a diver finding treasures in the sinking parts of the city, though Silvia’s frustration that as a refugee she can’t get a place at school even though she arrived before the rich kid and through her exploration of the city – coming across abandoned building projects and crumbling roads. So much of this feels and sounds familiar to our world today, even though this is set in the future.

This was the last book I read from the Climate Fiction Prize shortlist, and as I’ve said, I thought the way the author wove the climate crisis into the setting for this story was excellent. It felt incredibly real, and scarily, very easy to imagine. The linked themes of being a refugee and trying to find your place in a new world were also very well done, and reflected a reality that is already happening in the world today.

Overall, this was a good read, though the magical elements were sadly lacking for me. I enjoyed the narrative style of the writing and was very impressed with the way the author tackled the climate and refugee issues. I do recommend if you enjoy character driven books and dystopian novels.