A futuristic thriller about climate change by the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow Meek’s
Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce . The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably
devastating effect: Venice submerged cyclones in Oklahoma megafires in South America. Yet it
could be much worse. Two decades earlier the global protest movement known as the Upheavals
helped break the planet’s fossil fuel dependency and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto
Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the
environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding including
pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who
works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping
the story will save his job he travels south and using a fake identity makes contact with
the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship leaving Jack torn about exposing
Cave—an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new
romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the
nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is
dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential
inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live.
