The Temperature

Publishes 04/09/2024. 

Susan Midalia’s Review 

It would be all too easy to disregard yet another novel about climate change; even worse, to make a bad joke about the market currently being flooded with books about the problem. But Katerina Gibson’s debut novel The Temperature explores the issue of climate change with profound intelligence, ethical subtlety and imaginative flair. Above all, Gibson is a wonderful story teller: she creates the narratives of six markedly different characters who are either passionate about, indifferent to or actively hostile to the realities of climate change. Each story shows Gibson’s remarkable ability to inhabit the inner and outer worlds of a millennial media writer; a failed poet; a factory worker and father; a fading activist icon; a non-binary visual artist; and a Vietnam veteran growing old and discontent in rural isolation. These intensely immersive stories vary in tone, from the deftly satiric to the melancholy, from the despairing to the hopeful; and each one reveals the ordinary struggles of the everyday business of work, family, sexual relationships and friendship. They also vary in setting, from the grungy share houses of Melbourne, the stifling heat of Brisbane, the studios of Sydney and the sequestered space of rural Tasmania. 

As well as telling the stories of six different lives, the novel intersperses passages that directly address the ravages of climate change. These, too, vary in tone from explicit denunciation of our exploitation of the environment to exquisite lyricism in praise of the beauty and resilience of the natural world. What also distinguishes The Temperature from so many other books about climate change is its ultimate insistence of human connection; by the end of the novel, all six characters are either directly or tangentially linked, and capable of understanding different perspectives on life. Like the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens, The Temperature uses seemingly coincidental connections between characters as a metaphor for our responsibility to one another; it suggests that before we are anything else, we are parents and children, siblings, lovers and friends, with an ethical obligation to care about those who have tried, however badly, to care for us.

Katerina Gibson’s first book, the award-winning short story collection Women I Know, showed her skill in imagining characters different from herself. The six different characters in The Temperature are all fully realised, complex characters who are troubled, flawed, and in some cases at least, graced with the power of forgiveness. 

The Temperature will be available in the Lane Bookshop in September. It’s an exuberant, sombre and moving read from another talented Australian writer. 

Publisher’s Review 

The debut novel from the multi-award winning author: six very different characters each have their lives altered by a tweet, a storm, a revelation – and a secret in one of their pasts.

What brings six very different people together? Fiona is a millennial media writer; Sidney a failed poet; Tomas a thirty-something factory worker and father; Lexi a fading activist icon; Govita a non-binary visual artist; Henry a Vietnam veteran ageing out in rural isolation. On the face of it, they have nothing in common – but when a tweet goes viral, it sends their lives ricocheting off each other and upending their assumptions about each other, the world they live in, their pasts and their futures.
 
Following her acclaimed collection of stories, Women I Know, Katerina Gibson’s debut novel demonstrates her extraordinary range of sympathy and interest. Compelling and discursive, ironic and serious, compassionate and ethically rigorous, The Temperature describes our fragmented society as it tries to absorb the significance of climate change, social media, shifting boundaries in gender and sexuality, and deepening gaps between generations. The Temperature is about whether we can learn, personally and collectively; about the cyclical nature of grief, catastrophe and revelation. It is a novel about how we might live through the end of the world.
 
A contemporary equivalent of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity or Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, The Temperature marks Katerina Gibson out as one of the most ambitious, engaging and significant of our emerging writers.