The Last Island

His grandmother had been counting her steps to the high-tide line every morning for twenty-nine years. Now she was asking him to carry it forward. Toa Tuilagi is sixteen. He lives in a village on the leeward coast of Savai'i, in Samoa, in a wooden fale his grandfather built in 1962. When his grandfather built it, the sea was sixty-three metres from the back step. This morning, his grandmother's count is sixteen. The sea has been coming for the village his whole life. The young men in white shirts from Apia stopped measuring in 1995. His grandmother — Falute, who reads a newspaper a day and the sea every morning — has been keeping the count alone for twenty-nine years, in a palm-leaf notebook in a kitchen drawer. When the New Zealand consulate's envelope finally arrives, with the page-seventeen waiver buried at the back of a thirty-two-page form, Toa's grandmother sets it down on the cooking stone and asks him to make a decision that no sixteen-year-old should be asked to make alone. He is not alone. Four other young people, on four other coasts, have been on the same small green light for nine months — and one of them, Ndidi from Lagos, types back at three a.m. with the single sentence that breaks him open. For readers ages 13 and up. The most lyrical and most generational book in the Climate Keepers cycle. About what you carry when the ground itself cannot be saved. About a grandmother's twenty-nine-year notebook. About 315 names of one coast, a recipe for palusami, a single silver-blue shell from the lowest tide of the year, and the Samoan word sina, which is both the colour of the moon on the night the trades change and the name of the girl Toa loved who is now in Mangere. This is Book Five of The Reckoning. Each book stands alone. The finale — The Gathering — brings all five Keepers together at last. "We are not, in the end, an island people because of the island. We are an island people because of the carrying.