A Friend of the Earth

Front Cover
Penguin, Sep 1, 2001 - Fiction - 368 pages
One of LitHub’s "365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library"

“Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the darkly comic.” –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
 
Originally published in 2000, T. C. Boyle’s prescient novel about global warming and ecological collapse


It is the year 2025. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most mammals—not to mention fish, birds, and frogs—are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star's private menagerie that "only a mother could love"—scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions.

It wasn't always like this for Ty. Once he was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. as a member of the radical group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter Sierra and his wife Andrea. Now, just when he's trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life. 

T. C. Boyle's eighth novel blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species.
 

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
25
Section 3
47
Section 4
62
Section 5
88
Section 6
105
Section 7
133
Section 8
153
Section 10
202
Section 11
236
Section 12
253
Section 13
273
Section 14
298
Section 15
326
Section 16
344
Section 17
353

Section 9
181

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About the author (2001)

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published sixteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995; his 2003 novel Drop City was a finalist for the National Book Award. His honors include the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara. 

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