The Light Pirate
Wanda is born during the hurricane that takes her mother and the lights, in a near-future Florida the federal government has stopped funding because the storms have made it unsalvageable. The book moves through four sections of her life, Power, Water, Light, and Time, following Wanda from infancy through old age in the abandoned swamp town of Rudder. The bioluminescence in the water starts recognizing her. Brooks-Dalton writes the climate collapse with patience and the nature-mysticism with restraint, building a 70-year arc that ends with one old woman and a Florida that has become something else.
What you might want to know about The Light Pirate
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A girl born in a hurricane grows up in an abandoned Florida town as the climate collapses around her, in Lily Brooks-Dalton's 2022 climate-fiction bestseller.
The Light Pirate was written by Lily Brooks-Dalton and published in 2022. Brooks-Dalton is also the author of Good Morning, Midnight, which was adapted into the 2020 Netflix film The Midnight Sky directed by George Clooney.
Yes. The Light Pirate is widely cited as a defining cli-fi novel of the 2020s. It follows a girl growing up in a Florida slowly being abandoned to climate change.
The Light Pirate is a standalone novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, not part of a series.
The Light Pirate is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.