I’ll say this up front: Seed by Bri Lee is the best novel I’ve read this year. It’s thoughtful, tense, provocative and emotionally devastating. It has everything you could possibly want in a thrilling story.
Mitchell and Frances work together for one month a year at the Anarctos Project, a seed vault in an isolated and secret Antarctic location. Like all seed banks, it is a human attempt to ensure the future of plants for future food on Earth. After their helicopter doesn’t arrive to collect them and their technology fails, they are faced with a dilemma: try to trek to McMurdo Station to catch the last flight home before winter or stay in place.
As a lifelong reader of Antarctic stories, I was keen to read another. Under the author’s deft skills, Antarctica became not merely a setting but a major character in Seed. Despite the place being wide and open, I felt it was claustrophobic and always unpredictable.
From the first page, the story was compelling. Was my initial sense of doom going to play out? What was going to happen next? Would the human characters resolve their challenges or would the landscape ignore them and behave in unpredictable ways?
The fact that many of my (and other) questions were unanswered by the end of story added to the suspense. I loved this because plotlines weren’t tied neatly but left open for the reader to imagine. I’ll be reading this book again but more deeply this time to investigate many of the themes (earth’s changing climate, reproduction, techology and survival) that were woven throughout it. It’s a beautifully-written and thought-provoking story.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster Australia for sending me an advance reading copy. Seed will be available in bookshops at the end of the month.