What happens to New York City when the glaciers melt? Eiren Caffall explores the all-too-real possibilities in her debut novel All the Water in the World.
In this urgent and captivating story, young Nonie and her family live atop the American Museum of Natural History where they’ve taken refuge along with a small community of researchers. Together they work to survive and preserve the museum’s collections. Nonie is gifted with an ability to sense water and weather. When a super hurricane breaches the city’s flood walls, she must escape north with her family on the swollen Hudson river in search of safety and a new home.
All the Water in the World is literary speculative fiction with the pace of a thriller. This novel will inevitably draw comparisons to Emily St John Mandel’s entrancing Station 11. Instead of a lethal pandemic, ecological collapse here is the catalyst. Rather than preserve Shakespeare’s oeuvre, Caffall’s characters protect records of human history and science. Both novels are driven by a community of three-dimensional, deeply human characters traveling a post-apocalyptic landscape. Equal parts terrifying and dazzling, All the Water in the World offers a stirring environmental call to action and a meditation on hope.
Caffall’s previous writing on loss and nature has appeared in a variety of publications. Her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary was published by Row House Publishing in early 2024. I enjoyed an engaging conversation with the author over Zoom. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jenny Bartoy
How did this story come to you?
Eiren Caffall
I worked on this book for a very long time. I was already in that space, reporting around ecological crises. I’m lucky enough to be the daughter of an EPA scientist, and I’d grown up while my mom was in school for her degree in geology. So from an early age, I was very aware of ecological collapse. I watched Hurricane Katrina happen when my kid was about six months old, and my mother was sending me articles about the rate of environmental collapse. I was seeing it in my own reporting and in my work on what became my memoir. So I was thinking about the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic ecosystems in a really deep way, then Superstorm Sandy hit New York.
My godfather lives in Brooklyn, and he called me on the way home from sump-pumping his daughter’s basement and told me, “It’s weird what happens in a storm like this.” The oil that came up from gas stations was all over the ground, and it was like walking on an icy sidewalk. And just that detail [led me to] thinking about the place where I was born, New York City, and what might happen to it if the science I was reading were to come to pass. Sleeping next to my little kid, and thinking about what kind of a world he was going to inherit was a huge inspiration. We went to the Field Museum in Chicago almost every week until he was in kindergarten. I had grown up going to the American Museum of Natural History, and I thought, where would I go if everything fell apart? And it would be to a place like that.
Jenny Bartoy
If I had to encapsulate this novel in one word, I would say it’s a novel of grief. Grief for those we loved, but also for the life and the world we knew. Do you agree?
Eiren Caffall
Yeah, absolutely. The novel was written side by side with The Mourner’s Bestiary, my memoir that came out in 2024, so I was thinking and researching a lot about grief and the grieving process. I’m from a family of people with an incurable genetic disease, so I grew up around a lot of loss. And again, because I was raised by somebody who was very clear-eyed about the losses of the ecosystem, [grief] has never not been part of my vocabulary. I’ve always been in a space of holding tension between wonder and gratitude about being alive and how beautiful everything is, and also the fact that things that we love can be lost to us and we have no control over it.
That grieving process is an inevitability of living in late-stage capitalism and eco-collapse, where we are experiencing destruction over and over again in ways that permeate our day-to-day. I don’t think it’s possible for me to write a book where that isn’t a big part of the theme. But also, I’ve survived loss. I’ve rebuilt my life. I have a beautiful family. I’ve survived my own illness for a lot longer than I thought I was going to. So I wanted to also talk about the way in which grieving and mourning can be a doorway through to creating a world that you want to imagine after the losses, to be able to hold that as a possibility as well. What do we lose, but also, what do we save? And how do we save that?
Jenny Bartoy
Your characters repeat the question, “Who benefits?” I appreciated this, as I ask my kids the same question in political discussions at the dinner table. As in, let’s question this power structure. How did politics factor into your writing?
Eiren Caffall
I don’t think I could write without my politics being right out there. Again, EPA scientist mom, my parents were hippies. I grew up in a particular political milieu, and I’m multiple generations into it. But I want [the book] to be an open invitation that doesn’t exclude anyone, no matter what their political leanings or training up to that point. We all can come to the understanding of the reality of climate change from whatever path we emerge from.
The politics in [this book] were based on what I think are core human principles: that everyone deserves to survive and that the planet deserves to be stewarded. There are people who don’t share my politics who believe that to be deeply true, and I didn’t want them to be alienated from a book that is intended to help all of us process our grief as much as possible. I have met enough Republican hunters who love the same woods that I learned to protect. [We shouldn’t] be siloed by a sense of political position when it comes to things as important as our mutual survival and aid and the non-human creatures that we love and the places that we love.
I really value invitational literature. I also find it important not to hide — my politics are there. [But] we have lots of great examples of invitational spaces where we can create connections between people, where their needs and wants are affiliated. I’m married to a union organizer, and there’s no political affiliation required to join a union. It’s a place of invitation, about protecting each other, making sure everybody has good health insurance and a living wage and can take care of their families. Frankly, everybody’s needs and wants should be affiliated. Thinking about climate collapse, even if you’re a billionaire, it’s not going to leave you alone. It’s everywhere all at once.
Jenny Bartoy
Margaret Atwood said that she imagined her frightening dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale by studying the past. You extrapolated the imagined events in this story from actual science. Can you tell me more about your research process?
Eiren Caffall
I wrote the first draft of the book with a map on my desk from a book that’s published by the Riverkeeper organization that encourages people to paddle the Hudson River. A huge part of the book happens on the Hudson and I had that map open on one side of the desk, and then a tab open of a website that would let you flood Planet Earth to X number of degrees of sea level rise. So I could compare and contrast, what would be below water in the current moment and what would be below water in an imagined future with this level of sea level rise, so that in those moments where I was picking a place for my characters to camp for the night, I was picking some place that was accurate to what it would look like if everything went down.
When I first started writing the book [years ago], the idea of a “hypercane,” this sort of enormous hurricane that is at the beginning of the novel, was speculative science in a lot of ways. People were talking about it as a possibility. And in the last couple of years, these hypercharged hurricanes that pass by the normal hurricane scales [look like they] could become a reality. We’ve started to see that in the last hurricane season. We don’t actually need to invent anything terrifying in a dystopia. We can actually just talk about what is possible that we might experience.
Jenny Bartoy
Not to armchair diagnose anybody, but your narrator seems to exhibit traits of neurodivergence, which spoke to me personally. What doors did Nonie’s particular voice and perception of the world open for you narratively?
Eiren Caffall
This is a cliché thing to say, but Nonie just kind of showed up one day and was like, “This is how I talk.” For me, it’s partially a familiar voice, because it’s also mine. Many of the people I love are connected to that world of neurodivergence. As a writer, [I went through] a process of figuring out why trying to write in a voice that felt more neurotypical didn’t really work for me. When I leaned into the things that I was obsessed with, and took my time to figure out the emotional impact of my own obsessions, and gave myself the space for it, then a truer voice and a truer version of myself emerged on the page.
I did have moments where I wondered, are people going to connect with my obsession with fish or the museum or a young narrator who is, because of trauma, because of neurodivergence, presenting a bit of a wall between herself and the world? Will they want to stick around and be in her thought process? And eventually it was a process of realizing we know and love people who are neurodivergent all the time, even if we don’t always know it. It’s just a different mind than one’s own, which is the invitation of fiction all the time, no matter whether that person’s neurodivergent or not. Their interior is what’s interesting to us.
Jenny Bartoy
Nonie’s a bit of a human barometer. She feels storms coming, and she’s very attuned to water. Deep intuitions are common in neurodivergence, but this character trait also felt like it verged on magical realism at times.
Eiren Caffall
It’s common in spaces of curation and art making, and also in museum science and in STEM, to see people who are gifted with an ability to understand something that the general public doesn’t. And being given access to a mind like that is fascinating. As somebody who spends a lot of time reading scientific literature, I don’t really believe there’s much of a separation between magical realism and the science that we’re about to discover.
People who have neurodivergence often have special, extra-sensory [abilities] that are being studied now, for example, being able to feel barometric changes or magnetic resonances more than people with neuroconfirming minds. People who maybe have a special gift that they keep secret or that they don’t know how to explain experience that deeper kind of truth, which is what magical realism is. It works in metaphor. And we might be on the verge of a scientific discovery that says, yeah, actually, here’s the part of the brain that works as an extra-sensory barometer for people who have this kind of wiring. I like to think about the fact that we’ve just, within the last ten years, discovered that pheromone trails that are left through the woods by predatory animals can be picked up by prey animals hours to days after the snake moves through the forest. That sense of danger that you experience in a space actually is scientifically provable. So I’m not sure that [sensing water] is far from being just as scientifically provable as it is metaphorically true.
I knew there was going to be a lot about this book that felt like magical realism or [required] a leap of faith, a stretch of the imagination. We don’t have flood walls yet in New York City, right? I’m imagining a world where that happened. I’m imagining a lot of things which are outside of the factuality of our day-to-day. But as a person who writes really deeply about ecosystems, I wanted those things to be rooted in science. The scientific parts are frightening enough or beautiful enough or complex enough to feel like fiction sometimes, but I wanted them to be based in reality, so that you have that complexity of the imagined world, and also the reality of the way that the planet really works.
Jenny Bartoy
The theme of recordkeeping runs through this novel. A museum of natural history by default does the work of documenting ecological, animal, and human discoveries. Then the community living there continues to record their findings in log books. Why was this important to you?
Eiren Caffall
My aunt is a medievalist, and one of the things that was fascinating about talking to her was this idea that, when we have collapses in human society, there are always spaces where human beings are recording and retaining information from the community, the culture, the society that just collapsed, even from empires. I was super interested in monastic culture in the Middle Ages, that was reproducing the literature of the previous multiple hundreds of years, so that people could retain it and distribute it.
I’ve spent a lot of time in museums. They are spaces where we’ve made a lot of mistakes — mistakes that science makes, mistakes that colonialism and Empire make — in terms of stealing items from cultures and refusing to return them, keeping them captive for a really long time. And yet [museums] also move science and understanding and the retention of the entirety of human history and human discovery. They hold that as well. I know that the people who are deeply in love with museums don’t ever come at them with an uncomplicated relationship to what they are and what they mean. But museums are also a site where in great periods of collapse, we think about what we want to save, and we believe in a future world that’s going to want the information — and then they’re the key.
I got really obsessed with the story of the curators who stayed behind in the Hermitage in Leningrad during the siege in World War Two, chipping ice off the masterpieces, burying their dead in shrouds made out of extra canvas, eating restorer’s paste. It happened in Iraq too. This happens when wars collapse the basic social norms. There’s a great photograph of Winged Victory being loaded out of the Louvre during the run-up to Nazi occupation that’s just so stirring. Because it is part of the resistance process. We do deserve to preserve our culture and our understanding.
I think [that’s] a big impulse of this book. I’m one of generations of artists and activists who’ve been passing information along, and I’ve inherited my parents’ libraries. It’s incredibly important to me to be able to pass this on to my child, that sense that you don’t lose your power unless you start losing your memory of what’s been understood before.
Jenny Bartoy
Your characters exist in a largely egalitarian community, which I found a heartening vision of the future, considering the current erosion of women’s autonomy and rights. A sort of matrilineal force also anchors the story. I’m curious about your approach to writing gender.
Eiren Caffall
Part of this has to do with my exposure to gender roles and the way that my family operated. My mother went back to school and was multiply degreed and was the breadwinner from my teens on, and her mother had a PhD in the 1920s. That sense of [egalitarianism] was just baked into my experience and the community that I grew up in. We lived first in a community of artists, and then we moved to a college town, and you see women with a lot of power in those spaces because they’ve pushed back against patriarchal expectations.
In the scientific communities where my mom was educated, I was going out on field trips with buses full of every kind of person who wanted to be a scientist. And that was important to me in writing the characters who end up on the roof [of the museum]: it wasn’t just lots of different genders and gender expressions having different kinds of power and information and training, but it was also people of different races and different nationalities all coming together. One of the things that’s a great blessing about STEM is that it’s becoming more integrated.
When men have relationships within egalitarian spaces, their strengths are there, but so are their deficits. I don’t think we see male characters that complex often. Either they have a lot of power and they have to be up on the horse all the time solving everything, or they have no power and they’re failing people. I’ve certainly written women in this book who are making bad choices and handling things badly, but I wanted to make sure that the men felt complex too. We have a sense that, when there’s a crisis, we have to hand everything over to somebody who’s going to fix it for us, and I think that damages men’s understanding of what it is to live in trauma, as much as it does women’s understanding of it.
Jenny Bartoy
You tell the story in two timelines: when the first big storm hits and Nonie’s family has to take refuge at the museum, and when the hypercane comes and they have to leave the city altogether. The entire novel exists in this ever-collapsing reality. This underlines the many layers of refugee crises likely to happen in a future climate collapse.
Eiren Caffall
The question of refugee status is one of the things that I worry about the most. Again, there’s lots of time for us to save things! But I get worried thinking about climate migration. That’s already ongoing at the moment, the way in which influx of climate migrants pushes forward authoritarian and fascist regimes because of the pressure of new people living in countries where they don’t want to live but [the place where they would have rather stayed] is now uninhabitable. So that storyline was incredibly important to me, because climate refugee status is not going to be limited to people in sub-Saharan Africa or coastal places. It’s everybody. We all are in danger of it from one kind of pressure or another. Travel is part of the new reality of climate collapse. Migration is part of it.
Jenny Bartoy
Knowing everything you know, having done this research and written this book, do you have any hope for our future?
Eiren Caffall
Oh yeah, absolutely. There are people who articulate the specifics of that hope a lot better than me. A really great book came out this year, What If We Get It Right by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She is a voice that I follow very intensely for practical solutions in terms of the science and possible futures that we have unfolding in front of us, and the very real sense that we still have time.
I have been in a family that has had an incurable disease for 150 years, and it is still incurable. It can kill people very young. But the incredible changes in the way that we have understood the disease, treated it, researched it, and also created societal structures to protect people with it over that 150 years have been astonishing, so that the outcome of my health is so different than the outcome of my great grandfather’s. I think about that every time I think about the problems of climate collapse.
We have an enormous problem. It is going to require all of humanity to work on it together. Millions of people right now are working on it in one way or another, from legislative positions, scientific positions, activist positions, art. And we are attempting to move this incredibly impossible thing to a different place. But that is not unprecedented in human history. We have done that before with things that also seemed impossible. Every time we tell people there isn’t any hope, we discount and disparage all of that incredible focus and the possibility that still lies ahead of us. We are a smart species. Smart enough to make a mess and smart enough to clean it up. There’s no part of me as a storyteller, as a journalist, as a writer, as an activist, that wants to discount the power we have to change and repair.
FICTION
All the Water in the World
by Eiren Caffall
St. Martin’s Press
Published January 7, 2025
