The City Where We Once Lived by Eric Barnes
In a near future where climate change has severely affected weather and agriculture, the North End of an unnamed city has long been abandoned in favor of the neighboring South End. Aside from the scavengers steadily stripping the empty city to its bones, only a few thousand people remain, content to live quietly among the crumbling metropolis. Many, like the narrator, are there to try to escape the demons of their past. He spends his time observing and recording the decay around him, attempting to bury memories of what he has lost.
But it eventually becomes clear that things are unraveling elsewhere as well, as strangers, violent and desperate alike, begin to appear in the North End, spreading word of social and political deterioration in the South End and beyond. Faced with a growing disruption to his isolated life, the narrator discovers within himself a surprising need to resist losing the home he has created in this empty place. He and the rest of the citizens of the North End must choose whether to face outsiders as invaders or welcome them as neighbors.
The City Where We Once Lived is a haunting novel of the near future that combines a prescient look at how climate change and industrial flight will shape our world with a deeply personal story of one man running from his past. With glowing prose, Eric Barnes brings into sharp focus questions of how we come to call a place home and what is our capacity for violence when that home becomes threatened.
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Praise for The City Where We Once Lived
“Barnes’s new novel is a rare and truly original work: a hard-edged fable, tender and unflinching, in which a man’s descent and renewal is mirrored by his city. An eerie, beautifully written, and profoundly humane book.” – Emily St. John Mandel, author of STATION ELEVEN
“Written in a gorgeously spare language that perfectly reflects the dystopic future this novel depicts, The City Where We Once Lived kept me enthralled throughout. At the core is a deep and admirable compassion for humanity.” – Chris Offutt, author of COUNTRY DARK
“A stunningly-written tale of loss and grief.” – Lindsay Moran, former CIA operative and author of BLOWING MY COVER
“Spare and elegant, Eric Barnes shows us what it means to inhabit – a building, a city, a life. And also what it means to be inhabited – by memories, by ghosts, and maybe, just maybe, by hope.” – Elise Blackwell, author of THE LOWER QUARTER
“An intensely envisioned work of dystopian realism and American desolation, beautifully drawn from the slow-motion apocalypse of everyday life.” – Christopher Brown, author of TROPIC OF KANSAS
“A controlled burn of a book, full of horror and sadness and, once the fire dies down, the beauty of new growth. In the tradition of J.G. Ballard and Margaret Atwood, Eric Barnes gives us a dying neighborhood of outcasts who save the world that has cast them out.” – John Feffer, author of SPLINTERLANDS
“With deft prose and a discerning voice, The City Where We Once Lived is a taut examination of the archetypes and rituals that form the landscape of community.” – Courtney Miller Santo, author of THREE STORY HOUSE and THE ROOTS OF THE OLIVE TREE
“The voice is appealingly quiet, the atmosphere dreamlike, but the premise of poisoned ground, weather gone haywire, and a government that has thrown up its hands, is frighteningly real.” – James Whorton, author of APPROXIMATELY HEAVEN, FRANKLAND and ANGELA SLOAN
“Eric Barnes’ The City Where We Once Lived is a most original novel, surprising and fierce – a dazzling puzzle of grief and utopia, dystopia and hope.” – Minna Zallman Proctor, author of LANDSLIDE
Reviews of Something Pretty, Something Beautiful:
“Elegantly constructed and lovingly, tenderly, savagely written… the most harrowing portrait of American boys careening into manhood that I’ve ever read.
And the truest.” – Benjamin Whitmer
“[A] remarkable book. … This is a world where the pull of friendship is far stronger than the pull of family, where cars are freedom, stories are everything, and home is thick with ghosts.” – Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
“The new novel chronicles in stark, effective prose a boy’s tragic discoveries about how friendship works.” – Peggy Burch, The Commercial Appeal
“Elegantly constructed and lovingly, tenderly, savagely written…. The most harrowing portrait of American boys careening into manhood that I’ve ever read.” – Benjamin Whitmer, Satan Is Real
“…the book’s impressionistic, running narrative, the immediacy and matter-of-factness of its full-throttle prose.” – Leonard Gill, The Flyer
“[A] disturbing but finely and passionately wrought novel.” – Rebecca Oppenheimer
Praise for Shimmer:
“Case’s slow but accelerating downward spiral drives the narrative….” — Publisher’s Weekly
“One is reminded in Barnes’ language and locution of Don DeLillo’s scalpel-sharp delineation of American corporate culture and paranoia, and of David Foster Wallace’s penetration into the heart of the relationship between human consciousness and rapidly changing technologies.” — Fredric Koeppel, The Commercial Appeal
Author’s Bio
Eric Barnes is writer of the novels The City Where We Once Lived (Arcade Publishing, April 2018), Something Pretty, Something Beautiful (Outpost19) and Shimmer (Unbridled Books), an IndieNext Pick. He has published numerous short stories, and works as publisher of The Daily News and host of Behind the Headlines.
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My Review
4 stars
In the future in an unknown time a city is divided between North and South. Climate change has wreaked havoc in this world and the North End has been abandoned by all but a few that have decided to try to make a living alone and scavenging. The majority of the populous has moved to the South End and seems to be making a recovery from all that has happened. The story is told by an unknown journalist that is hiding from the loss of his family and trying to record all that happens.
But then something starts happening. Some people from the South have started coming to North End and started making trouble. Those in the North are going to have to come together and form the community that they have tried to give up without success if they plan on keeping their homes.
This book is an interesting read. There is not a lot of action or major events happening, it’s more of a slow boil that gathers steam. There is not a lot going on in the first part of the book but a bleak, monotonous world that the narrator lives in. The action does pick up with the teenagers causing problems but it doesn’t really go anywhere.
This is one of those books that I wanted more from and a better ending but at the same time I was invested in the story and didn’t want to put it down. It has the potential for a real action packed story but it just is there.
I received a complimentary copy of this book. I voluntarily chose to read and post an honest review.
I would like to thank Skyhorse Publishing for the opportunity to read and share this book.
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