The Deluge

By: Stephen Markley

Narrated by: Corey Brill, Danny Campbell, Gibson Frazier, Stephen Graybill, Soneela Nankani, Joy Osmanski, Melissa Redmond, Aida Reluzco, André Santana, Neil Shah, Aven Shore, Shakira Shute, Pete Simonelli, Shaun Taylor-Corbett

A New York Times Notable Book
“This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.” —Stephen King

From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

©2022 Stephen Markley. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved

S King said it best - prophetic and terrifying

4.35 stars
I sometimes get scared off by books over 40 hours in length and I don’t often take heed on the quote on the cover from another author/newspaper/etc. But this book was different. Stephen King’s quote on the book cover was very spot on:
This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.

I would partially agree on the uplifting part of it and fully agree on the prophetic and terrifying aspects to go a little further of downright disturbing. This book is so realistic that I feel like it’s happening, and these people are real people. And I keep thinking about it… unfortunately…

To put it simply, this author built a backstory of a collection of characters that started 10 years ago from current day. He then took all the current nature-based crises and all the predicted crises and amplified those by tenfold or so and then told the story as if we were all living it in real time. Global warming is out of control (planes can’t even operate in Phoenix because it’s too hot), forest fires happen so quick and burn so hot that they melt everything in their path like lava, hurricanes are so huge that they span from island country to island country, wiping out and displacing millions of people, and American politics is out of control (not a far cry from today).

There are some very interesting ideas brought up in this book to where I wonder where we blur the lines of science fiction to going-to-become-reality. Just wait until you get to the actual Deluge. That was an intense sequence of events that raised my heartrate significantly.

One of my complaints about the book is that when we go from chapter to chapter, changing points-of-view, it is not always clear on who the next POV is. I think this was the intention but for reading comprehension, it would have been better if this was announced at the beginning of the chapter (or at least early on). This book does great at staying linear (for the most part) in the timeline and makes sure the reader knows where we are in time. There are a ton of characters but there is enough ‘review’ to know who is who (and some characters can be forgotten – I think).

Audiobook narrator [Full Cast] rating: 4.3 stars
I thought the narration was great and it was fun having a mostly full cast audio production. I am not sure what the complaint was from other reviews on Audible about this (saying it sounded like it was recorded on a headset). The speaking was clear to me. The Audible phone app still really sucks. I wish they would improve it to make it useful, or at least somewhat compatible with other audiobook apps. It’s too bad we can’t listen to these Audible books on a different app that works appropriately.

If you read one book this year, read or listen to this

Yes, this is a very long book and worth every sentence. For the first 20 hours I actually made myself notes to keep track of the characters. During the time that I was listening to this book, I was stunned, and a bit frightened by how often scenarios that were being presented as near future fiction in the book were actually playing out in our present. The author and the very capable readers did an extraordinary job of demonstrating the intricate complications of climate, change, politics, economic, disparity, migration, and disease. Get this book, read it, or listen to it, and talk to others!

if you read only one book, make it this.

Everyone on the planet should read/listen to, this. Especially Americans. My son recommended it and it was well worth the time invested.

Incredible work!!

Narration was spot on for this incredible work of literature! This is a must read!

Good Story / Strange Performance

I am about 2/3 the way through this novel. The story is fine but the people reading frequently mispronounce words. How did so many errors make it through to the final product?

Uneven but unsettling

First off, kudos to all the voice actors. Their performances we’re really really good and added to my enjoyment of the book.

The book is certainly over along and uneven put it is important to remember that this is a work of fiction and not a documentary.

Reviews that call the book woke are, I think, very wrong. It it is the story of people striving for a future society different in the one we live in today. It is a society that I would love to live in.

If you don’t want to live in that kind of society, you will find the book woke. If you do, the book is definitely worth your time.

Powerful, Dark, Uneven

It’s an epic size, at 896 pages, with over 40 hours of recording.

It covers the lives of climate scientists, policy experts, activists, PR folks for the FF industry, junkies, FOX watchers and others, from the Obama years to the 2040’s.

You get to know these folks. You can relate to quite a few of them. Others are disturbing. But you get to know each of them from their own perspective.

The science and economics and policy and politics sewn into the book are reality based. The author clearly did his research.

And the storms come. And the deaths—from storms and from violence.

During the time I was listening to it, here in real life, we had record lows caused by polar warming. Mount Washington saw a windchill of -108°F, the lowest recorded in the US ever. People in locations nearby lost power in these very dangerous conditions.

And suddenly I felt positioned in a story that gives us vivid detail of what is coming. My imagination has always been enough for me to envision how bad it will get. But now I have real-to-me people that are riding out what’s coming. And the polar vortex became more firmly part of the series of events unfolding around us. Small, daily denial of how bad the climate crisis is and will become seemed to slip away.

I’m not sure I like the book. Or love it. Or hate it. It is definitely too long and uneven at times.

But it is clearly powerful enough to find its way into my daily reality.

Masterpiece!

Epic in every sense of the word, this book is a must read for anyone involved/curious about the climate crisis. Cannot recommend enough

Best in Show

Can't recommend highly enough. Complex, highly disparate characters, intertwined story lines, plot twists and exceedingly well researched scientific material come together in a completely believable foretelling of one possible collective future.
Markley's scope and vision are remarkable.

Couldn’t stop listening

Brilliantly crafted and performed. I listened to the entire book in a week. The story is tragically real but in being so, inspires me to want to do what I can to steer us away from the path this story follows.