Pigs in Shit

Climate fiction has long shown us the future we’ve got in store: rising tides, drought, blight, extinction. , Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s brutally gorgeous fourth novel, and his first translated into English, shows us something very different, but equally apocalyptic: how we got here in the first place. Following a family of French pig farmers over a century, the novel opens in the village of Puy-Larroque, in southwest France, at the end of the nineteenth century. An unnamed farmer and his wife, referred to as the Genetrix, raising enough animals to survive. They are joined by a daughter, Éléonore, whose life the book follows