Tasmania

A Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker

After losing the future he imagined for himself, a writer sets out in search of connection and purpose at a tipping point with climate change and global conflict, in this breathtaking novel from the Strega Prize–winning author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

In late 2015, Paolo feels his life coming apart: While his wife, Lorenza, has decided to give up on pregnancy after years of trying, he clings to the dream of becoming a father, not just a father figure to Lorenza’s son. As their marriage strains, Paolo immerses himself in work, traveling to Paris to report on the UN Climate Change Conference in the wake of terrorist attacks that shook the world. His journalism dovetails with a book he hopes to write on the atomic bomb and its survivors, a growing obsession that will take him to cities across Europe and ultimately Japan.

Along the way, Paolo interacts with a vibrant cast of characters, each struggling to find their own Tasmania, a safe haven in which to weather the coming crises—global warming, pandemics, authoritarian governments, and wars. He develops a friendship with a brilliant, opinionated physicist, who followed the scientific path Paolo had abandoned, and who will test Paolo’s loyalty and values.

A stunning return to fiction after How Contagion Works, Paolo Giordano’s semi-autobiographical novel captures the fear, anxiety, wonder, and beauty of this time of uncertainty and upheaval, exploring how we can create and maintain relationships with other people when it feels increasingly difficult to connect.“[In] this searching novel…Giordano explores the challenge of finding safety in a world where disasters—from bombings to rising sea levels—proliferate.” —The New Yorker

“A resonant story of a writer worn down by the climate crisis and rising authoritarianism…With incisive prose, Giordano brings order to the messy tangle of Paolo’s emotional turbulence and political convictions. This soars.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brilliantly unsettling…In one magnificently conceived sequence after another, Giordano charts Paolo’s intellectual and personal journey…Giordano’s propulsive prose and intellectual rigor make this novel a thrilling experience.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“An absorbing novel that builds steadily, not to a shattering or violent conclusion…but to a quiet release that is humane and persuasive.” —Arts Fuse

“A compulsively readable novel, Tasmania evokes the probing, introspective spirit of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Giordano has written an urgent and moving book that looks with unflinching honesty at the crises of our troubled moment, as well as the fragile spaces of hope and connection in the midst of the storm.” —Scott Guild, author of Plastic

Praise for The Solitude of Prime Numbers:

“Mesmerizing...An exquisite rendering of what one might call feelings at the subatomic level.” —New York Times

“Giordano’s passionate evocation of being young and in despair will resonate strongly with readers.” —USA Today

“Elegant and fiercely intelligent...[a] singular love story.” —EllePaolo Giordano is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010), which has been translated into more than forty languages, as well as The Human Body (2014), Like Family (2015), Heaven and Earth (2020), and the nonfiction title How Contagion Works (2020). His novel Tasmania is a bestseller in Italy and has been sold in more than thirty territories. Giordano has a PhD in particle physics and is a regular contributor to Corriere della Sera. He lives in Italy.

Antony Shugaar is the author of a number of books and has translated hundreds of others, including Everything Is Broken Up and Dances by Edoardo Nesi and Guido Maria Brera, Notes on a Shipwreck by Davide Enia, and The Piranhas and Savage Kiss by Roberto Saviano. His translation of Gianni Rodari’s Telephone Tales received the American Library Association’s 2021 Batchelder Award. He is the editor-in-chief of Redcar Press, a new publishing house focusing on translated fiction and graphic novels.In November of 2015, I happened to be in Paris to attend the United Nations conference on the climate emergency. I say that I happened to be there, but not because I hadn’t intentionally sought out that situation. Actually, environmental issues had been foremost in my mind and my reading for some time now. Let’s say there had been no climate conference in the offing, I’d still have probably come up with some other excuse to get away from home—say an armed conflict, a humanitarian crisis, any preoccupation different from and larger than my own concerns. Perhaps that’s the reason some of us fixate on impending disasters, why we have a proclivity for tragedies—a proclivity that we palm off as noble—and those fixations will serve to build the center of this story, I believe: our need, with every step of our lives that proves excessively complicated, to find something even more complicated, something more compelling and menacing in which we can dilute our own personal suffering. So maybe, really, nobility has nothing at all to do with it.
It was a strange time. My wife and I had tried, repeatedly, to have a child, persisting for roughly three years, subjecting ourselves to one medical intervention after another, each more humiliating than the last. Though I should say, to be as accurate as possible, it was primarily she who subjected herself to those interventions, because for me, after a certain point in the process, it was about playing the part of a pained bystander. Gonadotropin hormone injections, in vitro procedures, even three increasingly desperate trips overseas, about which we breathed not a word to a soul: in spite of all our blind determination and the substantial sum of money we poured into the plan, it hadn’t worked out. The divine message conveyed by those repeated failures was clear: none of this forms part of your destiny. Since I stubbornly refused to admit it, Lorenza made up her own mind—for me as well. One night, tears already dried or entirely unshed (I’ll never know which), she informed me that she was no longer willing to. That’s how she put it, with that truncated expression: I’m no longer willing to. I had rolled over onto my side, turning my back to her, and let the rage steadily fill me, rage that swelled in response to a decision that struck me as unjust and one-sided.
At that time, my own little personal catastrophe loomed much larger in my mind than did its planetary counterpart, the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the retreating glaciers and rising sea levels. In order to get out of that uncomfortable situation, I asked the Corriere della Sera to arrange accreditation for me at the Paris climate conference, even though the deadline for requesting credentials had already expired. I was forced to beg them, in fact, as if attending that conference were a matter of life or death for me. All I was asking was that they pay for my flight and the articles I’d write there. No need for a hotel, I’d gladly arrange to stay at a friend’s place.