You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories (Paperback or Softback)

"Elegant, incisive, memorable." — Foreword Reviews

“Punches will not be pulled.” — Locus Magazine

"The 15 masterful stories in Cade’s sophomore collection (after The Mythology of Salt) offer a hauntingly beautiful melding of hard science and raw emotion against the backdrop of the climate crisis. ... Cade skillfully interweaves her characters’ existential despair in the face of a dying planet with more personal grief, all while maintaining a through line of hope and resilience. In its union of deeply human and environmental narratives, Cade’s collection will put readers in mind of Richard Powers’s The Overstory." — Publishers Weekly starred review

Eco-horror to Solarpunk short stories from award-winning author Octavia Cade.

Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s beautifully-wrought stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. Including an original novelette in the award-winning The Impossible Resurrection of Grief universe, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.

Octavia Cade is a speculative fiction writer from New Zealand. She has a PhD in science communication and a particular interest in how science is used in horror and science fiction that she likes to explore in both her academic and creative work. She has sold around seventy stories to various markets, and these stories increasingly focus on ecology and how people relate to their environment. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016. She was a visiting artist at Massey University in 2020 and the Ursula Bethell writer in residence at Canterbury University in 2023. She is currently plotting a non-fiction book on urban ecology.