My Volcano

One morning, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, which, three weeks later, will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event appears to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena occurring around the world.

My Volcano is a pre-apocalyptic vision following a cast of characters experiencing private and collective eruptions: a boy in Mexico City finds himself 500 years in the past; a scholar in Tokyo studies a story about a woman coming down a mountain to destroy villages; a trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilisation on an impossible planet; a nurse works with Syrian refugees in Greece, grappling with the trauma of surviving an American bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan; a nomadic herder in Mongolia finds himself transformed into a thorned, flowering creature trying to assimilate every living thing on Earth into its consciousness.

With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn't let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history, myth, and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you reach its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line. - Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that's both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed. - Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian)

My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions. - Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig