The Ministry for the Future

Set in the not-very-distant future, this is a novel about pulling Earth back from the brink of catastrophic climate change. The bureaucratic sounding Ministry for the Future is an agency of the UN, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, and tasked with figuring out how to accomplish that impossible seeming goal. It's headed by Mary Murphy, an Irishwoman with a strong memory of the Troubles, with staff from all around the world. Chapters are from the perspectives of many different people (and other entities!) experiencing changes. A few characters return repeatedly (Mary Murphy and her staff among them), while others pop up only once.

The opening chapter is a heart rending description of people in a town in India experiencing a catastrophic heat wave. I had to put the book down for a couple of days after reading it, but given the subject matter I was surprised that that was the hardest chapter to read. The story wrestles with whether drastic enough change can be brought about quickly enough without violence. Some of the chapters go quite in depth on banking and world economic systems and don't read like a novel at all. This is a wide ranging, kind of shaggy novel with an optimistic heart.