Ship Breaker

Nailer works a light crew on the Gulf Coast, stripping old oil tankers for copper wire and whatever else can be salvaged and sold. The work is dangerous, the hierarchy is brutal, and the only thing keeping him alive is being small enough to fit into the spaces the tankers' original builders never intended anyone to enter. Bacigalupi built this world from research into real ship-breaking operations in Bangladesh and India — the near-future Gulf Coast is an extrapolation, not an invention, of conditions already in place. When a clipper ship wrecks in a storm and Nailer finds a wealthy girl alive in the wreckage, he has to decide whether to strip the ship for everything it's worth or help her survive — a decision that is simultaneously about survival, loyalty, and the possibility that a person can choose to be something other than what their circumstances have made them. The most important climate fiction on the stage-3 shelf for readers who need the argument embodied in a specific kid in a specific crisis rather than delivered as data. Bacigalupi doesn't soften the economics or the ecology — both are as brutal as the research says they should be. National Book Award finalist. The companion to Dry: where that novel shows climate collapse in suburban California, this one shows what it looks like at the bottom of the global system.