DYSCHRONIA - a cli-fi novel from Jennifer Mills in Australia

DYSCHRONIA

OUT NOW WITH PICADOR AUSTRALIA

An electrifying cli-fi novel about an oracle. A small town. And the end of the world as we know it...
One morning, the residents of a small coastal town somewhere in Australia wake to discover the sea has disappeared. One among them has been plagued by troubling visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet? Does she have a disorder that skews her perception of time? Or is she a gifted and compulsive liar?
Oscillating between the future and the past, Dyschronia is a novel that tantalises and dazzles, as one woman's pescient nightmares become entangled with her town's uncertain fate. Blazing with questions of consciousness, trust, and destiny, this is a wildly imaginative and extraordinary novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

"There is a poetry in Mills's writing that shimmers like desert air — 'the infinite glistens in the minute' — and in her storytelling, in the way she captures the moods of time, there is something mystical...

This is a novel that is daring, original and ambitious."

- The Australian

"With quietly devastating elegance, Dyschronia reminds us that time and place are really two sides of the same coin... its vision of a world transformed by human activity also allows us to grasp the degree to which the ecological crisis that surrounds us deranges our notions of scale, collapsing geological and human time in unpredictable and often terrifying ways. That it manages to do this while still making space for the hope and possibility embedded in its final pages is a measure of the achievement of this intellectually rich and stylistically thrilling novel."

- Australian Book Review

"Tantalisingly dark... [a] mesmerising take on the future...

At a sentence-by-sentence level, Mills' writing is exquisite; the story pieced together from a delicate web of details."

- The Age/Sydney Morning Herald

"Dyschronia by Jennifer Mills is like a puzzle laid for the wily reader, a challenge and a eulogy both... You should read it because it’s radiant and ambitious; an imposing project that Mills has executed with barely an off note.

The markers of this book – a nostalgia for a now which is slipping through our grasp, an anxiety about future resources, a collective lack of power and agency, and even the lack of clear antagonists – are the markers of our age, and of our generation... The dirge-like, dreamlike tone of this novel, an intricately constructed linguistic music, imparts a kind of mournful solemnity."

- The Lifted Brow

"Jennifer Mills’ ambitious third novel casts out in many directions at once, mingling grim environmental warnings and thoughtful sci-fi motifs with an intimate family study and talon-sharp critiques of corporate culture... Mills’ poetic instincts make for some stunning reading."

- The Big Issue

"Mills is a conjurer of evocative language and fantastic imagery with a unique and poetic writing style, some sections of the novel looping time scales to create surreal dreamscapes... [Dyschronia is] ambitious and deserving of a wide audience."

- Kill Your Darlings

"Shockingly good."

- The Saturday Paper