The Diapause

When ten-year-old Gabriel and his parents retire to his late grandfather’s disused cabin to wait out a pandemic, the big, dangerous world seems very far away, and Gabriel enjoys the freest summer of his young life. But tensions begin to surface, testing the family unit, and resulting in consequences that he will spend his life attempting to unravel.

Spanning nearly a half-century, The Diapause is a literary-speculative-fiction novel about the near future, family, isolation, heartbreak, climate change, how we keep each other safe, and all the things we don’t know about the people we know best. Part White Fang, part Station Eleven, The Diapause is a novel about how the things we seek are often the things we didn’t know we’d lost.

Andrew Forbes is the author of the short story collections Lands and Forests (2019), and What You Need (2015), which was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and named a finalist for the Trillium Book Prize. He is also the author of two collections of baseball writing, The Utility of Boredom and The Only Way is the Steady Way. His work has appeared in publications such as the Toronto Star, Canadian Notes and Queries, and Maisonneuve Magazine. Born in Ottawa, Forbes has lived in Atlantic Canada and rural eastern Ontario, and now resides in Peterborough, Ontario.

Praise for The Diapause

“Both a grim look at the dark side of survivalist psychosis and a heartbreaking love letter to the disappearing worlds around us. … The Diapause could be read as a cautionary tale were it not for the beauty that Forbes manages to coax from beneath the unstoppable depression his speculative landscape serves. That the possibilities of the future he creates seem so achievable makes it something of a somber journey—its loneliness perhaps misconstrued as a bad thing. In fact, it’s Gabe’s unavoidable solitude that fuels his vigor and which Forbes writes into mesmerizing, unforgettable prose.”—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“A focus on memory and experience creates an atmospheric pastiche of the future through the successive slices of a life in progress; recommended for the discerning reader.”—Library Journal

“Andrew Forbes’s exquisitely rendered prose makes The Diapause both realistic and futuristic, devastating even while it is oddly hopeful. Vast and intimate, the novel absorbs and grips. I cannot shake its central image: the strange little noodles, the mysterious worms who seem to be dancing in the moments before catastrophe.”—Liz Harmer, author of Strange Loops

“Lucid, intelligent, haunting, The Diapause deftly spans forty years and puts the climate crisis in focus as omnipresent reality. Andrew Forbes writes with considerable verve and tenderness on the heartbreaking ways humans fail each other and their environments. A remarkable read that sharpens our present moment, and asks what we will take into the future.”—Michelle Min Sterling, author of Camp Zero