What is Lily Brooks-Dalton reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of The Light Pirate.

Her entry begins:

I recently finished Dinosaurs, by Lydia Millet. I listened to it, actually, and although I do find that I miss certain elements of a terrific book like this one when I’m listening as opposed to reading, I also got to take long walks with it, which felt like a pairing the book itself would appreciate. I usually have an audio book and a physical book going at the same time. That said, I think I’ll need to buy a copy of Dinosaurs at some point, just to go back and admire some of the nuance that I’m sure I missed. The story is wonderfully engaging without being particularly interested in plot or conflict, and to me that is a wildly difficult trick for a writer to pull off… the literary equivalent of watching someone walk a tightrope between two skyscrapers. Another reason I loved it is that I’m particularly drawn to books that deal in the anxiety of being alive right now without succumbing to...[read on]

About The Light Pirate, from the publisher:

For readers of Station Eleven and Where the Crawdads Sing comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman’s lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world.

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

Visit Lily Brooks-Dalton's website.

Writers Read: Lily Brooks-Dalton.

--Marshal Zeringue