Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel traces the diverging fates of siblings Sylvia, Fern, and River from their late-1980s childhood in a small British Columbia logging town, where their mother Lynn’s environmental activism sets them apart from the local community, to 2020, when a forest fire forces a fraught, baggage-filled family reunion.

As a child, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods. She is also most like Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions come to a head, Lynn leaves her partner Tom and their children, telling herself she’s going to devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.

At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. As she goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Reverberations of Fern’s crime follow the siblings well into adulthood, and when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the house she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets. 

Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, The Fall-Down Effect asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.