About this book
I wrote Inversion because I have always been fascinated by the thinness of the line between ordinary life and complete upheaval. We tend to think of the world as stable because it was stable yesterday, and because our streets, homes, schools, and routines convince us that tomorrow will arrive in a familiar shape. But the planet has never promised us that. Beneath our feet, above our heads, and within the systems we rely on, there are forces far older and larger than we are.
The novel began with a scientific question: what would happen if volcanic activity, atmospheric instability, and climate disruption collided in a way humanity had never seen before? From there, the research moved through volcanoes, ash clouds, weather inversions, atmospheric layers, glacial systems, migration patterns, emergency response, and the fragile assumptions built into modern civilization. I did not want the disaster to feel like a movie spectacle dropped from the sky. I wanted it to feel like something that begins in data, in instruments, in headlines people half-read, and then slowly becomes impossible to ignore.
At its heart, though, Inversion is not only about catastrophe. It is about family, memory, and the stubborn human instinct to protect what we love when the wider world stops making sense. Joy’s home in northern Ontario becomes one of the emotional centres of the book because survival is not only about supplies, weapons, or escape routes. Sometimes it is about a grandmother refusing to let panic decide who her family becomes.
I hope readers come away from Inversion thinking about humility — not helplessness, but humility. We live on a living planet, not a machine built for our convenience. For educators, librarians, and curious readers, the book offers a way into conversations about climate systems, geological time, emergency ethics, migration, resilience, and the stories we tell ourselves when certainty collapses. It is written for readers who enjoy speculative fiction grounded in real anxieties, but also for those who understand that the most important question in any end-of-the-world story is not what breaks first, but what people try to save.
