Fiction | Young Adult
Publication date: May 10, 2025
Trade paperback: 9781988989921
epub: 9781988989938

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Decades after the world was levelled by the effects of human-made climate change, the scattered remnants of humanity have begun to pull themselves together. Birch and Jay are a young couple living in a small, idyllic community away from the ruins of one of Canada’s great cities.

As a newly graduated Knowledge Seeker, Jay must leave Birch and their community to collect remnants of old wisdom from the dead world. Along the way, he comes across a mysterious elderly woman who offers to travel with him. He will receive more than a travel companion — she offers revelations about their town’s founding as well as knowledge of how to survive in a lawless world.
 
Birch, seeking adventure, pursues Jay but finds more danger than she ever imagined. Will they find each other in the chaos and brutality of the city and get safely back home to tell the tale?

About the Author

Allister Thompson was born in the UK and spent his childhood in Mississauga, Ontario, where he got his first part-time job in a small bookstore at the mall at age sixteen. He has spent the rest of his life working in the publishing and bookselling industries. He worked for small and mid-sized publishers in Toronto for fifteen years before striking out on his own as a freelance editor. This freedom eventually led him to North Bay, Ontario, where he has lived and worked with dozens of authors for the past ten years. 

Praise for Birch and Jay

“Thompson’s novel offers a compelling salutary tale of a future which we would all be much better avoiding. In this future Ontario, a fraught landscape sets the scene for an entertaining tale where teenage angst, wanderlust, and desire play out in a plausibly violent dystopic future. The kind of future that is coming if we, the current inhabitants of Ontario, and much of the rest of the modern world, don’t change our hyper-consumptive ways and start taking the future seriously.”
 
—Simon Dalby, Professor Emeritus, Wilfrid Laurier University, author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World