Paradis

Who hasn't dreamed of running away from the turmoil of civilization to live the rest of their days on a tropical island? It's 2042 and rising floodwaters have forced widespread evacuations across Florida. But Adeline Thorndyke, a sixty-two-year-old retired biology teacher, decides not to join the roads overflowing with evacuees. Instead, she spends her savings on fifty acres of land on a Florida barrier island named Paradis, seeking a simple existence among the sandy pines.

But what Addy hopes will be a tranquil escape from the modern world proves to be anything but simple, forcing her to face the challenges of isolation, the dangers of the wild world, and the instability of the digital one. As she navigates the dichotomy between her return to nature and the persistence of technology, Addy meets a cast of eccentric characters also living off-grid, each with their own vision of survival.

Paradis is a novel about resilience, community, self-reliance, and the grief that comes from losing the world you knew. Can Addy find peace in the wild, or will the gravity of civilization prove impossible to escape?