Sea Now

Press & Reviews

'Eva Meijer’s Sea Now is often laugh-out-loud-if-bitterly funny […] and it is compassionate and engaging […] But what really makes this book stand out is its clear, captivating depiction of the more-than-human as agents, actors with varying levels of consciousness but real capacity to make choices about how they exist in the world.'
- Natalie Bennett, former Green Party leader

'People picture disaster either as a sudden explosion, or as something that might happen elsewhere, or far in the future. But in Sea Now disaster just comes, crawling forward, wave by wave. One day, the tide simply comes in and stays. It is unprecedented, mystifying [...] an intriguing view of what climate disaster might look like—not so much a flash flood, but instead a slow creep, taking cities over one by one [...] will keep readers drawn in until the end.'
- Leah Rachel von Essen, Chicago Review of Books

'One of the unanticipated highlights of my reading year [...] a fabulist disaster novel, doubling as identity-of-the-nation commentary [...] playful, with a dry sly omniscient voice [...] a little bit as though Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008) (or Japan Sinks) had been rewritten by Italo Calvino....the cumulative effect of this wide-ranging, generous narrative attention is a constant sense of motion, and a lightness of touch that allows Meijer to move smoothly from, say, haunting elegy to academic satire to a more serious intellectual point [...] Simply as a page-to-page reading experience, Sea Now is consistently fresh and interesting: You never quite know where its eye will fall next [...] Sea Now struck me as sharply challenging in its diagnosis: that governments are powerful and can achieve great things, but that the incentives they respond to can make them slow and belated; that the sea level rise is the end of a process, not the start of one; that ‘’a loss of faith in the idea that things would keep on getting better’’ might, tragically, be rational, or might at least require redefining what ‘‘better’’ means.'
- Niall Harrison, Locus

'Sea Now unfolds from both broad and intimate perspectives with a voice that, in Anne Thompson Melo’s translation, is delightful and terrifying in its simplicity [...] It isn’t just a human story, but one of overfished fishes learning not to be afraid; of shellfishes, birds, rabbits, and ‘sea-being’; of horses discovering that ‘what they mean by freedom [is] the seaweed that moves inside you’; of whether, like mussels and octopuses, ‘the sea dreams’ [...] In its regard for other-than-human Earthlings, Sea Now joins Meijer’s rich oeuvre of novels and philosophical meditations on multispecies coexistence. One could read this novel as the story of two characters—the Netherlands and the sea—posing a question of each other: What am I? What and who is “the Netherlands”? What and who is “the sea”? The first question implicates uncomfortable stories of value: Who determines the status quo that decides who or what (a foreigner?, a painting?) deserves to be saved, who or what (a US-trained scientist?, the Dutch language?) would count as a loss? [...] Meijer’s prose, in Melo’s hands, flows quietly with a consistent bittersweetness, and the novel’s pervasively dreamlike quality underscores the true horror of this entirely realistic scenario.'
- Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Asymptote

'Broadening both the scope of the novel and the bounds of our understanding and empathy [...] What sets Sea Now apart from other recent climate fiction, however, is its decentering of the human perspective [...] It asks us to think more broadly than we are accustomed, to take the time to imagine the lives of rabbits and fish, and to wonder what the sea might feel.'
- Rebecca Hussey, Words Without Borders

'Consistently funny, poetic, philosophical…this hard-to-classify story of rising oceans and displaced populations hits a tone that I found mesmerizing and deeply humane… Sea Now gets ever stranger and more enthralling as it goes on, refusing to offer any neat and tidy messages.’
- Jake Casella Brookins, Ancillary Review of Books

‘A cracking novel... This is a little classic... Meijer is a beautiful, agile writer, moving effortlessly between different characters (a young girl, a climate activist, a marine scientist, the PM and the Minister of Defence), the mighty and infinite sea, and the skies and scapes of Holland... The awful strength of the book is the calm and factual way it drowns a country and a culture, a history and national story, as quickly and unfussily as a rising tide, showing how thin and delicate are the binding forces we call normality and civilisation... You should read this book. There is an awful wriggling kind of pleasure deep in your stomach as you watch it happen. It is a nightmare presented as a montage of documentary, portraiture and poem, drama and seascape, full of humour, tenderness and a kind of longing: a longing that stories like this are all the apocalypse of civilisations as we know them will amount to. It is too good a book to have a simple message, but its deepest point is unarguable: longing cannot stop the rising sea, and at the moment, longing is all we are offering, and longing is not enough.’
- Horatio Clare