NOTABLE
A Novel
A woman who’s right about the end of the world, and what being right costs her.
Out now in paperback and Kindle
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About the book
The world did what she said it would. Nobody thanked her.
In February 2028, a briefing comes back to Ruth Ellery’s desk with the word unprecedented struck out for the third time. Someone two floors up has replaced it with notable, and written in the margin: Feels alarmist. The paragraph said that the fruit would not set. It was a description of dirt.
Ruth is not a scientist. She is a mid-level analyst in a state department, and her job is to turn what the data says into paragraphs a minister can read on the way to a meeting. For eleven years she has kept a number in her phone that nobody else is watching: the temperature at which a human body, in the shade, with water, can no longer cool itself. Now she has a spreadsheet, a listing for forty acres in the rain in north-west Tasmania, and a family that thinks she needs to see somebody.
She is right. That is the problem. Being right, she will learn, is not a thing you get to feel. It is a thing you pay for, one name at a time.
Sixty years later, her granddaughter is handed a piece of paper on a runway at the bottom of the world, and told her grandmother would have signed it.
Notable is a novel of the next sixty years, told from a hill in Tasmania and a desk in Adelaide, about a border, a family, and the difference between being right and being on the record.
New to Tasmania and the islands? See the map of Notable’s world
For readers who’ve finished
Finished Notable?
There’s one more story. The Cooler follows Val through four days in Port Augusta in February 2041, told from her side.
It gives away how the novel ends. Please save it until you’ve read the last page.
Get Val’s storyComing next
The After the Winter trilogy
About the author
Carl Eugene Kinsella lives in the Adelaide Hills with his partner, close enough to the vineyards to walk to them and far enough from the city to watch the weather come in. He is a father of three and a grandfather of two, which is largely why he wrote Notable.
He has spent thirty-three years in roles that require people to read, understand, and act on briefings, writing the briefings that others edited. Notable is what he wrote when nobody was editing: the story of a woman who is right about the end of the world and has to decide what that entitles her to, and of the granddaughter who inherits the bill.
He has published non-fiction under other names. This is his first novel.