Nightshining

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-bloated stream and three-foot waves in her basement.This is far from the first—and hardly the worst—natural disaster to devastate her town. As Kabat dives deeper into the region’s fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections between noctilucent clouds, man-made precipitation, and the 1950 Rainmaker’s Flood—finding unlikely characters along the way, including Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, a scientist at General Electric. And all the while she searches for ways to cope with the grief of her environmentalist father’s recent passing. “Because I need the water to speak to me too,” she writes.Curious and experimental, Nightshining uses place as the palimpsest of history, digging into questions of personal responsibility and planetary change. With “characteristically lyrical incision” (Marko Gluhaich), Kabat circles back to her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.