“All Hands on Deck is a brilliant meditation on the ways we cope with loss and the patience required to find ourselves again. Set against a backdrop of environmental threats, Bledsoe offers a layered and emotionally insightful portrait of what it means to be a survivor when so much has been lost. Intimate, absorbing, and masterfully written, this is a story that explores ‘the gulf between happiness and survival,’ and the quiet courage it takes to cross it.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Imagined Life

“For years, Lucy Jane Bledsoe has been our great chronicler of wild places and wild hearts, and in All Hands on Deck we find one of her restless adventurers navigating a life in upheaval. No longer facing down Antarctic winds with her wife, Sarah now traverses the terrain of what she calls ‘the last third of life,’ a landscape scarred by grief and betrayal but illuminated by friendship and love. From an unlikely road trip with a young climate activist on the run to the rekindling of a love born on the ice, All Hands on Deck proves that though the adventurer might go gray, her life never does.”
—Ashley Shelby, author of Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

“After the death of her wife, climate researcher Sarah knows more about the end of the world than the end of grief. A tenderhearted and unflinching exploration of loss, Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s All Hands on Deck follows Sarah as she navigates middle age, its accretion of losses, its unsettlement, and the courage at the heart of it all. Set against the backdrop of a planet in crisis, this is a novel ultimately about the places we call home—the bodies, the landscapes, the friendships—and what we do when they are gone.”
—Shobha Rao, author of Indian Country

“Wonderfully immersive and transportive, All Hands on Deck is another rich offering from the wise and gifted Lucy Jane Bledsoe. I love this world of science and mysteries and its characters of heart and hunger, in particular Sarah and the extraordinary terrains real and emotional that she travels. An engaging and soothing story of hope and personal power during these dystopian times.”
—Ethel Rohan, author of Sing, I