The Chthonic Cycle

We all used to be something else, and we will all be something new again in the worlds to come.

Written in an effort to ward off existential dread, and to find new understandings and consolations for those similarly afflicted, The Chthonic Cycle is an eccentric and brilliantly curated tour through time, in which fascinating objects glint and spark and the transience of humanity flickers.

At the heart of Una Cruickshank’s debut are Earth’s inter­locking cycles of death and reuse. The blood of a billion-year-old tree emerges from the sea as a drop of amber; 4,756,940 pieces of Lego float towards the Cornish Peninsula; a giant squid’s beak passes through a whale’s intestines into bottles of Chanel No. 5. The violence of colonisation underpins some of the transformations illuminated here, as we follow wave after wave of ruin and remaking.

This is a rare kind of writing, both galaxy-sweeping and microscopically specific. The Chthonic Cycle reminds us to be chastened and scared by our world – its mind-bending age, the insane complexity of its systems, the violent upheavals and mass extinctions – as well as to be awed.

Author Biography

Una Cruickshank has an MA in Creative Writing from the
International Institute of Modern Letters, and another earlier MA that
she doesn’t talk about as much. She was born in Tamaki Makaurau
Auckland and now lives in Poneke Wellington. She works at an
audiovisual archive and haunts the city’s cinemas and libraries, and
that one karaoke place that smells like boiled meat. The Chthonic
Cycle is her first book.