A storm strikes Minneapolis with a ferocity the world has never seen before, though the results are familiar: lives are lost, neighborhoods destroyed, communities upended. This is the new normal, perhaps, but faster and more intense than anyone had planned for (i.e., the new new normal.)
Naomi is a lawyer by day and an amateur MMA fighter by night, a Hawaiian transplanted to the midwest for her less-than-satisfying career. Amaré is a young investment banker who has some grand intentions for all the money he’s about to make. And Raheem is a diesel truck mechanic who finds himself in very bad shape ater the storm. Naomi and Amaré come together to rescue Raheem. For the next twenty-five years, their personal and professional lives intertwine into a gripping saga of American life in the age of climate change.

It is Naomi who has at the center of it, as she turns her frustrations with the legal response to the super-tornado into a political platform that leads her to a hot-button career in D.C. Her burgeoning relationship with Amaré both sustains and challenges them both as it competes with their ambitions—as Amaré develops more of a moral conscience to match his financial acumen and Naomi learns how to effect real change. And in the meantime, Raheem’s fate a blue-collar business-owner remains deeply intertwined with the grand projects of his two world-beating friends—including, eventually, their son, Rio, who will, of course, have to live in and be a part of this new world they leave behind.

The Names of the New World unfolds with the grandeur of a bold social novel like The Bonfire of the Vanities intertwined with the will-they-won't-they narrative suspense of Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Ranging from the midwest to Washington, D.C., to Naomi’s native Pacific Islands, The Names of the New World is, above all, a startling, energetic, and optimistic vision from a dazzling young author of how we’ll all live in this era of climate change.