This book was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Fiction Award in 2022 and has been on my list to read since then. It wasn't an easy read as I am not a huge fan of dystopian fiction. The bleakness of the setting, brought to mind Cormac McCarthy's The Road and I am not alone in this. Moleta adopted a similar style, with limited punctuation and at times this became frustrating. The first half or more of the book felt slow for me and I found the changing timelines could be confusing, as she uses this devise throughout to fill in the backstory of Li's life. The pace does pick up and there is definitely plenty to contemplate with regard to the impact of climate change on our world. ( )

Up front, it was utterly impossible to avoid comparisons with McCarthy's THE ROAD right from the start of this novel, so I gave up trying not to. Dystopian in nature, thriller in intent, UNSHELTERED is yet another one of those novels that I suspect will spark widely different reactions, and opinions.

A bold noir undertaking, this is the story of a woman's search for her missing daughter. A daughter Li never really wanted in the first place, although now eight-year-old Matti is missing, all she wants is to get her back.

Set within the dual conflicts of climate and societal breakdown, the dystopian future outlined in this novel feels very real (possibly helped by living in a country besieged by fires and floods of epic proportions at the moment), so the concept that a society collapsing in on itself can become so ... well feral ... is a sobering prospect indeed. And this is possibly where UNSHELTERED is at its best. It's a gruelling, emotional journey, and readers will need to develop a very close and binding relationship with the characters in this novel, because the setting is so fraught, so confronting and so dire it could be too much for some.

It's also an incredibly raw, and reflective trawl through the best and worst of humanity, which will engage with readers prepared to do some work - no speech marks, sudden timeline switches and time spent closely inside the protagonists heads, all make for a challenging, and sometimes downright confusing and confronting read, all of which felt very much by design. UNSHELTERED demands that the reader go on Li's journey with her - through every move, thought, doubt and misstep. You have to feel her fear, joy, disquiet, hate, love and failure just as she feels it. You may have to work at surviving UNSHELTERED just like she did.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/unsheltered-clare-moleta ( )