"This novel starts fast and never lets up. Carried along by waves of powerful, gorgeous prose, the story transports the reader across time and space, across land and sea. Washburn weaves the political, social, environmental and personal into a work of moral imagination that speaks to our moment with insight, clarity and power." —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“Kawai Strong Washburn’s first novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors is one of my favorite books, period. He is a force. The writing in The Names of the New World is cerebral, muscular, electric, moving us through disaster with a light touch, consistently tempered with tenderness, humor, and love, often gorgeous with poetry, and deeply insightful about what it means to be human now and moving forward, what it means to lose and to win both. This story moves, and is moving, and feels, throughout, utterly new. It is a fiercely original, relentlessly paced epic of climate catastrophe, exploring the jagged edges of American identity. It is a profound meditation and exploration of the debt the old world owes the new, told with the undeniable pulse of those left fighting in the ruins, here to name with a kind of nuclear power what it means to be alive inside the doomed and beautiful brilliance of the devastation of ends, of change, of life itself.” —Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars and There There

"The Names of the New World follows three strangers bonded as kin by a storm, tracing their entwined lives across decades of environmental devastation. You cannot help but fall in love with Washburn’s flawed and resolute protagonists as they march themselves, hearts open and fists swinging, into battles they know they cannot win. A tender look at what is maimed and spared when the physical world collapses around us, this book is a testament to the enduring worth of our fragile human bonds." —Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghosts