As I learned from an Amazon product review when purchasing this book, the title is “shorthand for some scientific term”. As I learned from a very straightforward google, it more specifically means, “a group of organisms believed to comprise all the evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor.” Starting in the near future, the novel follows the members of a family through the beginnings of the effects of climate change and into a full-blown planet-wide disaster.
The first few sections of the novel, in which the various changes to the ecosystem are lived through and discussed, made for un-put-downable reading, even if the writing wasn’t always amazing (I actually assumed it was a debut novel. Not so). Bradley traced through not only the events themselves, but some unforeseen theoretical consequences, which were sometimes unexpected but always believable. For some reason, though, the last couple of sections veer off this course and, while they are set in the same world only a few years later, are much more focused on particular events in the lives of the characters (which are not relevant to the overarching story) than on the world in which they are living them. Those sections were much less satisfying, with the result that my interest in the novel tapered off towards the end. Overall, this had the potential to be something more than it became.