Written from inside the compression chamber of 2020, this anthology gathers Australian writers responding to a year in which bushfire, flood, pandemic and political failure all merged into the same crisis.

Its essays move between personal witness, environmental history, grief, science, illness and public life, asking what happens when catastrophe isn't an interruption or blip, but the atmosphere itself. Contributors including Delia Falconer, Billy Griffiths, Alison Croggon, Melissa Lucashenko, Christos Tsiolkas, James Bradley and Tim Flannery write from homes, hospitals, fire grounds and altered landscapes. The collection is strongest when it resists the neat retrospective wisdom usually imposed upon disaster: these pieces retain the uncertainty, exhaustion and perceptual strangeness of events still unfolding.

Vintage paperback, 2020. First edition. Light shelf wear and minor cover marking; clean and firmly bound.