My Volcano

On June 2, 2016, a jogger spots a protrusion of rock rising from the Central Park Reservoir. It keeps growing for three weeks, until it stands nearly two and a half miles tall and has been identified as an active volcano. It looms over New York while the book follows a scattered group of people elsewhere.

An eight-year-old boy in Mexico City is carried 500 years into the past and watches the Aztec Empire fall. In Tokyo, a scholar from Nigeria studies a folktale in which a woman made of fire comes down a mountain and destroys a village. A white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a science fiction novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet.

A nurse in Greece treats Syrian refugees while living with the trauma of a hospital bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In Mongolia, a nomadic farmer is stung by a bee and turns into a green, thorned, flowering creature that wants to join every living thing into one consciousness.

The novel is a mosaic of separate lives, each reaching its own upheaval while the ground itself shifts. It blends parable, myth, science fiction and eco-horror, and its tone is strange, ambitious and experimental. John Elizabeth Stintzi won the Sator New Works Award for it.