Eco-novel Arroyo Circle masterfully illustrates the role of humanity and late-stage capitalism in the earth’s decay through a thrilling story set in Boulder, Colorado. With wildfires raging across the Front Range, floods decimating homes and lives along the creek, and the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking rampant catastrophe, author JoeAnn Hart illuminates the spiritual connectedness of chance occurrences and weaves a powerful tale of strife, introspection, and reclamation.

As wildfires attack the mountains and creep into town, Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden to a hoarder, is violently confronted by police who believe she put a baby in the trunk of her car. A subsequent cascade of misfortunes leaves Shelley unemployable and forced to rent out her home while sleeping in an unheated garage. Les, an alcoholic, shape-shifting scientist, lives in the creek bed behind her house and helps her navigate this new world, even as COVID-19 sweeps through town. With a strange mix of quantum physics, Buddhism, and Tito’s, Les teaches her about the healing powers of nature and the deeper meanings of home. Into their midst comes a dazed walker who is more closely connected to Shelley than she can imagine. When the warm Chinook winds blow through the mountains and melt the heavy snows, everyone, including the police, has one last shot at redemption.

Arroyo Circle is a timely, prominent, and intricately crafted work of art, an excerpt of which was selected as a winner of Novel Slices’ Novel Excerpt contest. As the complexity of the scientific discourse surrounding climate change remains inaccessible to many, Hart has brilliantly composed an emotionally gripping narrative, certain to communicate the devastation facing our planet while simultaneously kindling hope for individuals amid the crisis. Through her fourth novel, JoeAnn Hart exhibits her prowess in unifying the arts and sciences to offer an enlightening story that captivates and educates.

Arroyo Circle was selected as a winner of
Novel Slices‘ Spring 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest

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Praise for the Writing of JoeAnn Hart

 “Hart does an admirable job of developing memorable flawed characters and letting them loose . . .” —Publishers Weekly

“JoeAnn Hart is an accomplished writer, a writer with a mastery of the subtle, funny detail, a well-developed voice and stories to tell.” —Susan Cheever

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Advance Praise for Arroyo Circle

“An ambitious and fast-paced story of wildfire and pandemic and flood told through the eyes of characters living on the margins of our communities and the natural world. Entertaining, sobering, and thought-provoking, Arroyo Circle grabbed me from the first pages. I loved it.”

—Ellen Meeropol, author of The Lost Women of Azalea Court

“JoeAnn Hart has achieved the impossible: a beautifully written, page-turner of a novel about the climate crisis. Arroyo Circle, and its richly drawn characters, is urgent, impassioned and revelatory. If the world around us is burning, Hart is the poet/naturalist who will guide us through the flames.”

—Laura Harrington, author of A Catalog of Birds

“Against the backdrop of Colorado’s smoke-filled summer skies, JoeAnn Hart brings together an unforgettable cast of characters, drawn together by loss and by living on the edges of a society ravaged by climate change and Covid. Yet in a world where lives change in an instant, what prevails in this remarkable and inventive novel is compassion, hope, and the wonders of nature. At once haunting and witty, vivid and ethereal, Arroyo Circle is a beautifully written ode to our changing world.”

—Midge Raymond, author of Floreana and My Last Continent

“Arroyo Circle is a compelling story bringing climate change home in the characters of a climate scientist who abandons his job to live homeless and closer to the imperiled earth, letting his wild musings fly, and a woman whose trip to the grocery store becomes a nightmare of misunderstandings and unforeseen consequences. Wildfire, flash flood, hoarding, and pandemic come home to roost in Boulder, Colorado. The climate crisis is not a calamity that happens far away or in a distant future. No. Right here and right now it’s time to face the music and feel the emotional and psychological costs of what we have wrought. This is no sweet song, though small kindnesses, last-ditch efforts at hope, and the gift of an unlikely friendship sing memorably in this powerful novel.”

—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World:
On Fashion, Fishermen, and The Sardine Dress

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Media

 

 

 

 

 

 

“. . . Inspired by her time spent in Boulder, the death of her estranged brother, and issues facing the planet today, Hart’s novel is a poignant commentary on what it means to care for one another and in turn, what it means to care for the world around us. While the story paints a bleak picture of natural disasters and personal strife, Hart isn’t all doom and gloom—underscoring her novel is the potential for redemption in the face of catastrophe.

‘At its core, Arroyo Circle is about carelessness—carelessness with the planet, with each other— and I hope that some characters have moved on from carelessness to caregiving,’ Hart explains.

We sat down with Hart to talk about the ins and outs of quantum physics, how art can stop climate change, and the unique honor of being selected as an artist-in-residence at the world’s leading genetics laboratory. . . .”  —by Features reporter Ella Cobb / link to the full article
Ella Cobb covers arts, entertainment, and other fun stuff throughout the Front Range

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“Arroyo Circle is a fictional residential cul de sac in Boulder, Colorado. It’s also the title of Gloucester author JoeAnn Hart’s fourth and latest book.

What Hart, an award-winning environmental writer, has created in Arroyo Circle is a metaphor for 21st-century America, a beautiful place inhabited by humans who seem intent on destroying it through progress, aka profit.

Here, the achievements of two centuries of industrial and technological ‘progress’ driven by fossil fuels has come home to roost, wreaking havoc on a cast of characters who are as familiar as neighbors in any small American town.

Climate change — a topic Hart has explored in short stories, essays, and a novel — is central to the problems of Arroyo Circle, but Hart does not stop there. In Arroyo Circle, we get the full catastrophe of where the 21st century has taken America: a place threatened by epic consumerism, waste, and fatal carelessness. homelessness, and a culture of power and violence. . . .” Link to the full article

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Exploring the Climate Crisis Through Fiction / FALL FOR THE BOOK FESTIVAL (link)
Two authors tackle the climate crisis in their recent thought-provoking novels: JoeAnn Hart’s Arroyo Circle follows an ensemble of characters fighting against wildfires raging in Boulder, Colorado. Author Ellen Meeropol says, “An ambitious and fast-paced story of wildfire and pandemic and flood told through the eyes of characters living on the margins of our communities and the natural world.” Sharon Wishnow’s The Pelican Tide portrays a struggling Louisiana family. After an explosion at a nearby oil platform, the Babineaux family could lose everything as a result of the spill. Author Rebecca Hodge says the novel “creates a strong sense of place and deftly brings the natural world of this Gulf barrier island to life.”

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About the Author 

JoeAnn Hart is the author of Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, a prize-winning collection of short fiction released by Black Lawrence Press in September 2023. Her crime memoir, Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, (University of Iowa Press, 2019), weaves together the personal and public threads of a friend’s 1976 bow-and-arrow death. Her novels are Float (Ashland Creek Press, 2013) a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, and Addled (Little, Brown, 2007) a social satire that intertwines animal rights with the politics of food. Her short fiction, articles, and essays have been widely published, including in Slate.com, Terrain.org, the anthology Dreams of a Broken World, Orion, Solstice, The Hopper, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, America’s oldest seaport, where fishing regulations, the health of the ocean, and the natural beauty of the world are the daily topics of wonder and concern.

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SPECS
Arroyo Circle
FICTION
Paperback Original
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 254
Price: $19.95 (CA $26.95)
ISBN: 979-8-9891784-4-5
Publication Date: OCTOBER 2024
Distributor: IPG/Chicago, Ingram.
Rights sold: All rights available.
Rights & PR: Dede Cummings, dede@greenwriterspress.com

Distributor: IPG; also available through Follett/Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and other wholesalers.
Individuals can pre-order directly from Bookshop.org, or contact your local, independent bookstore.
Booksellers, libraries, colleges/universities, gift shops, etc., can order through IPG:
Independent Publishers Group
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60610
Order Placement: (800) 888-4741

To request an advance reader copy—digital or print—email dede@greenwriterspress.com