James Bradley's GHOST SPECIES is in the can and will be released in May 2020, although the overseas editions in the USA and the UK won't see the light of day until two years later, sources say

 

Photo of a beer brand in USA called GHOST SPECIES via Twitter hashtag #GhostSpecies 

AUSTRALIAN novelist, book and pop music reviewer, and essayist James Bradley is one of his country's most important novelists and public intellectuals when it comes to climate change issues and the fires burning in Australia this year. His new novel is sure to become a global hit, on a par with David Mitchell's THE BONE CLOCKS and Margaret Atwood's MADDADDAM trilogy. The new novel is titled GHOST SPECIES and it will be released in Australia only in May 2020 and won't ne released overseas in the USA or the UK until 2022, according to Australian literary sources.  He worked on the novel for the past few years, putting the fishing touches on it in 2018 and 2019. 

It will of course be well-reviewed in his native island nation, but unfortunately it will only be published in English inside Australia in 2020. Foreign editions in the USA, Canada and Britain -- all English-speaking countries -- won't be released by foreign publishers in those countries until 2022 or 2023. This provincial way of Australian publishers not releasing their local novels to other English-speaking nations is wrong-headed and backward, and yes, provincial. There is no logical reason to hold back Australian novelists from reaching readers worldwide at the same time and their novels are released in Australia. Shame on the AUSTRALIAN PUBLISHING INDUSTRY and the editors there for not doing more to promote their own native writers worldwide. I complained about this when CLADE was published in 2015, Bradley's earlier cli-fi novel, which did not find publishers overseas until 2017. Most likely, GHOST SPECIES will not be released in the USA or the UK until 2022 or later.

One fan and friend of Bradley wrote this preview on Goodreads after getting an early ARC (advance reader's copy) from the publisher as a promotional favor in January 2020. 

"Set principally in remote Tasmania, 'Ghost Species' begins like a hybrid of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, and Greg Egan’s Darwin’s Radio, combining the forward momentum of a' cli-fi technothriller' with the reflective inwardness of a literary novel. But Ghost Species is also very much its own thing, a politically-urgent and emotionally-resonant examination of scientific, corporate, and personal ethics in a collapsing world. As such, it is informed as much by Bradley’s recent non-fiction essays in Australian magazines on the climate emergency as by the narrative intricacies of his previous novels.

''Like his most recent novel 'Clade,' 'Ghost Species' is divided into titled sections, each taking place several years on from the preceding section, so that the novel unfolds over about 20 years. The cast of characters is smaller and more intimate than Clade’s multi-generational epic: Kate and Jay are scientists and sometime lovers, Davis is their enigmatic ... boss, and Eve is their bio-engineered daughter, the first Neanderthal to walk the planet in some 40,000 years. She is the main, but by no means the only, ‘ghost species’ of the title, one of many attempted de-extinctions intended to combat the ravages of a climate-altered Earth by jump-starting ancient ecosystems. It’s a global scale [event] that, like climate change itself, refuses to unfold as the models predict.


...'''Ghost Species' is an excellent, urgent, uncomfortable, and complex novel, for all that it’s written in spare, precise, and limpid prose. It is implacable in its implications, and yet tentative in its hope, for our own and for all the species that are still left on this burning world.