Best read under a canopy of the trees that might outlast us all.
Arboreality
Across a changing Vancouver Island, connected stories follow people finding ways to care for the forests and one another.
195g
Weighs the same as Battery Pack + Toothbrush
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Cli-Fi
When Rebecca Campbell published Arboreality in 2022 with a small press, it won the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Campbell tracks a single house in the Pacific Northwest over a century as the climate shifts and humanity quietly adapts—planting trees and building string instruments from the last old-growth spruce. It is apocalyptic, yes, but profoundly gentle, carrying grief and stubborn hope in equal measure. This is a quiet masterpiece, best read under a canopy of trees that might outlast us all.
Field notes
Campbell grew up among the forests of Vancouver Island, watching drought-stressed cedars and diseased arbutus trees transform a landscape she had once considered permanent. Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, with its imagined future society on the Pacific Coast, helped her envision what might come afterward. Campbell conceived Arboreality as a web rather than a chain: its stories are connected less by plot than by the ecological systems its characters inhabit. Brief, omniscient passages interrupt their individual perspectives, reaching beyond what any one person could know. The book's fragmented structure becomes an attempt to think at the scale of an ecosystem.