Excerpt from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That is a fabulous topic for a dissertation, Geraldine. I'm not the expert you want for that, but call in to me during office hours and we'll talk interdisciplinary options. Olwen waits until Geraldine nods. I'd take a guess, though, Olwen says then; I'd take a guess ... that a few of them cultural theories, about cycles and eternity, involve higher powers. And Hutton's point was that no higher power was needed to create dramatic landscapes of deposition and compaction. An active fault is a great rejuvenator. The earth is in a continual geological process of destruction and repair, destruction and repair, as long as there's still heat at the heart of it. As long as we stay near enough the sun, which drives so much surface geology. But before ye go thinking the destruction around us is part of a natural process ... Oil took millions of years to accrue, till we started boring holes in rocks and throwing in matches. And now, in under two hundred years, we've burned up nearly all of it. Europe's endemic forests took millennia to flourish. In five thousand years, we've destroyed ninety‑nine percent of them. In Ireland, we went the full hundred. And soil! Ye know soil? That's been around for a while. Until we discovered the burger. We ruin a lot of soil to grow a burger. If we keep up our hijinks, we have fifty yes of farming left.

A student at the back holds up his watch and calls time of death for the class. He is alternately shushed and supported by those around him. Had that been too much, too soon? A mood ring changes color on Fionnuala's finger as she tries to prize it past the knuckle, unsuccessfully. Olwen had one of those once, an eighteenth‑birthday present from one of her sisters, along with the note: "This is a mood ring. If it's mostly blue on you, it's not broken. I stole it so you can't return it sorry. Love you. Maeve." Olwen had heeded its warning—that she needed to do better at seeming buoyant to her sisters, whose guardian she had suddenly become. She wore the ring with the stone turned toward her palm.

Excerpted from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes. Copyright © 2024 by Caoilinn Hughes. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.