T.C. Boyle made his early reputation as one of the most extravagantly inventive comic novelists in America. In A Friend of the Earth, Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater is a suburban drudge and manager of an antiquated shopping centre in New York, whose life is completely changed by his marriage to Andrea, a well-known environmental activist. When they move to California, Tyrone becomes an environmental firebrand himself, and is eventually forced to go underground by the law. Flashing forwards to 2025, Tyrone is now an old man eeking out a living as the manager of a pop-star’s private animal menagerie which holds some species’ last representatives — global warming has killed off the rhino and elephant. And then there’s Sierra, Tyrone’s stepdaughter, who spends more than three years sitting several hundred feet up in a redwood tree.
T.C. Boyle's last work of the twentieth century seamlessly weaves these storylines together, to produce a modern morality tale, and a charcteristically skewed and provocative vision of the future. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping: A Friend of the Earth takes the environmentalist subtext of the bestselling Tortilla Curtain and plays it big.