The Coral Bones by E J Swift

This novel interweaves three stories, set around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. One follows Judith, a young woman on a sea voyage in the mid-19th century, the second follows Hana a marine biologist in the present day, and the third follows Telma, a representative of an ecological Restoration Committee, two centuries in the future.

Judith's story is the most engaging, partly because it is an old fashioned adventure, partly due to Judith's obvious delight in finding the pristine reefs, but also because to me she felt like the most well rounded of the characters, with the most engaging voice. 

However, the present day and future stories are most valuable for what they say about the state of the coral reefs and how we might begin to save them in the future. There are some excellent descriptions of the life around the reefs: 

'Rafi had included footage of seadragons mating. Telma watched a dance between pairs, mesmerised by the slow gyre of their movement, the ritual undertaking between male and female, an act that had been staged for countless millennia, and then never again. Their baroque bodies turned in the current, each seadragon endeavouring to mirror the subtle actions of their mate.'

There is also a lot of thoughtful consideration of what we risk losing if we lose the coral reefs to climate change. In some cases, these observations from the future are already being witnessed by coral scientists and divers today:

'Imagine a place you know intimately. A home, beloved, each brick and pane and furnishing and dirt or grease mark on the wall, every inch of the architecture infused with memory. Imagine one day you return and find nothing remains but the foundations. The ceiling is gone, the windows have vanished. What was a house is hollow. Even the air feels different. It is not a haunting, there are no ghosts here; the memories have been wiped. There is only absence. You stand, turning on the spot, looking about you. After a while, the doubt creeps in. You begin to disbelieve that this is the place you knew. That you were ever here at all. Such is the transformation, you cannot truly take it in. There must be some mistake.

Gone were the vivid reds and oranges, the yellows and pinks, the umbers and siennas, the gentle sepias, all the infinite hues of coral that make a healthy reef. These colonies were long past bleaching; algae had grown over their bodies,'

I really enjoyed how the novel brings together stories of the reef from different time periods, historical and imagined and leaves us with a sense of hope that it may not be too late for the Great Barrier Reef.

The Coral Bones by E J Swift, published by Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus.   

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Meanwhile, I've posted a wee piece about World Wetlands Day (which was on Monday) on my Crafty Green Poet Substack. You can read it here.