The Coral Bones, by EJ Swift

Three woman, separated by 250 years, are drawn to the same stretch of the Great Barrier Reef. In the present day, marine biologist Hana Ishikawa is working on a laboratory project to artificially evolve corals that will be more resilient to climate change. She also sets out in scuba gear to document the extinction of the coral out in the sea, bracing herself to dip under the water to see the damage done. Then a dead man is discovered in the water, his body painted in different colours as some kind of warning. The death creates headlines, and then the man’s widow gives Hana her late husband’s research, which includes old scientific papers about the waters where he was found, written by…

Judith Holliman is 17 when, in 1839, she convinces her father — a captain in the navy — to let her go with him on a voyage to chart the waters off northern Australia. Judith is an avid naturalist having read the books in her father’s library, but her options are limited due to her sex. How can she ever hope to be taken seriously, let alone be published? Things aren’t helped by the ship’s on-board naturalist, Mr Pook, treating her with such disdain…

And then, towards the end of the 22nd century, Telma Velasco is employed by a government agency to track down rare animals held in captivity, in a heat-ravaged world where climate mitigation is just beginning to have an impact. She is also grieving — or failing to properly grieve — the loss of a grown-up daughter in a wildfire. But then Team gets the most extraordinary tip-off…

As with the author’s When There Are Wolves Again, this is a brilliant book. Like that novel, it involves two women battling to respond to the debilitating effects of climate change, and begins in the present day and extends into the future. In doing so, it explores what we’re going to have to live through and what things might be done to protect ourselves and the environment. It is by turns devastating and full of hope. But here, there’s a third woman, writing in 1839, just after Darwin has published a report of time on the Beagle but before he’s worked out his ideas of evolution by natural selection. I think that would help win over readers who would not normally venture into sci-fi.

The three women are very different in themselves, a fact underlined by the audio version having three narrators, Anna Burnett, Brigid Lohrey and Kate Winter. The three protagonists live in very different times, facing very different social pressures. Yet all three share a passion for the natural world, a horror at its destruction, and are constrained in what they can do. It it seems impossible that any of them might have a happy ending. 

Hana, for example, is so overwhelmed by grief for the coming apocalypse, the sixth major extinction event on Earth, that she breaks up with her pregnant partner — unable to contemplate the world in which they’d be bringing up a child. Judith is on a last adventure before she is inevitably sent to London where her mother will find her a husband. Telma is so beaten up by grief and loss she can’t face her surviving family, including a new grandchild.

As the story continues, there are hints of links between these three women, and the chance to work out what became of Judith and Hana after their own accounts end, teased from clues in the later-set stories. It’s beautifully done, teasing us with pain and loss to come for these people we’ve come to like. They’re each well drawn characters, with foibles of their own: flawed humans, in the face of insurmountable odds and loss, trying to do the right thing and save something of our world. I didn’t want it to end.