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by Maia Kumari Bree Chowdhury (Author)
Rail: A High Speed Adventure is #3 of an ecofiction trilogy with love, mystery and adventure, exploring the intersections of design, ethics and the forces that shape our lives. Read standalone or in a series. Books #1 and #2, The Erenwine Agenda: A Hydraulic Fracturing Love Story and Otter Coast: A Medical Marijuana Mystery, were shortlisted in Visionary Fiction for the International Book Award, and the American Legacy Book Award, respectively.
For readers of Wild Dark Shore (Charlotte McConaghy), The Last Beekeeper (Julie Carrick Dalton), and The Blue, Beautiful World (Karen Lord), this novel offers a propulsive, systems-aware adventure with global stakes. With echoes of Moon of the Crusted Snow (Waubgeshig Rice), Flight Behavior (Barbara Kingsolver), and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Anita Rau Badami), it blends literary suspense with climate-aware storytelling.
Amalia Sengupta Erenwine is swept into an ambitious high-speed infrastructure proposal promising sustainability, innovation and global transformation. Working alongside her longtime collaborator Betsy Polson-an architect whose passions both support and complicate her own-she researches China's Silk Road corridors, moving onto the permafrost systems of Hokkaido and the stark frontier of Svalbard. As the world moves through a cataclysmic change, Amalia must confront the tension between visionary design and the communities asked to bear its consequences.
Betsy approaches the work with a steadiness that comes from long experience. She notices what others overlook and keeps the project anchored in the realities of people, materials and consequences. Her practical sense and her instinct to look out for those around her shape the partnership in ways Amalia depends on, even when they disagree.
When the project accelerates, Amalia finds herself moving through landscapes that feel both vast and intimate-permafrost, coastlines, Arctic light-each revealing the fragile seams of a world under strain. Visionary guidance arrives in unexpected forms, blurring the boundary between intuition and design as she confronts the weight of memory and responsibility. With every new country and crisis, the question grows sharper: how do you build for a future that is shifting beneath your feet, and what must be risked-or released-to do it with integrity?
A cinematic, continent-spanning ecofiction novel about ethics, movement and the evolving meaning of home.
