Katerina Gibson was named one of 2023’s Sydney Morning Herald Young Australian Novelists of the Year, and it’s worth noting that her first full-length novel had yet to be released at the time: her lauded short-story collection Women I Know (2022) was an indicator of things to come. The award was indeed prescient, because I am delighted to report that Gibson’s debut longform work, The Temperature, is impressive, and is one of the strongest Australian novels from an emerging writer that I’ve read this year, or any year.

The Temperature introduces six seemingly unrelated characters, and slowly but surely and with expert precision Gibson reveals how their lives are intertwined. This is life: the things we do, the reverberations of those actions, the places we make – all connected to each other and the Earth, to the past and the future, not atomised, singular and ahistorical as we are led to believe in the neoliberal discourse of our age. While this narrative structure is not a new approach in storytelling, what is outstanding is Gibson’s careful attention to the voices of each of these characters, and the political, generational and gendered identities each of them embodies. Like a writerly chameleon, she changes her style in each section, so the reader empathises with these people, inhabiting each of them as they make their way in the world as we know it.

There was a point in my reading where I wondered if I was reading a book that could be a harbinger of what might be called ‘post-climate fiction’: Gibson is not interested in the ‘shock and awe’ style of cli-fi set in the near-future, rendering an apocalyptic landscape, exploring what individuals will do to stay alive, hoping to sound a clarion call and scare people into action. Instead, the apocalypse is here as a slowly unfolding reality in which all are complicit. This, for the future record, is how it happened. It happened while most of us were doing other things. The sheer scope of themes this book addresses is exactly the kind of ambition, vision and purpose I crave and that I love about the best books I read: here is another incredible talent from the publishing year, 2024.