The Unworthy

An unnamed narrator takes readers through her life during a climate apocalypse. She is relatively safe from the worst of it, locked inside a religious order where she is deemed an Unworthy but strives to become Enlightened. Bazterrica’s novella vividly sows discomfort via both its plot and the way the words appear on the page. Unfolding in fits and starts, scribbled with whatever the narrator can find to use as ink, and only when she can steal time to do it in secret, the writing is often hurried—past and present muddled, words crossed out, sentences left unfinished. At other moments, it flows freely, allowing readers to travel to the past and catch a glimpse of how our own world ended. The unreliable narrator wins readers’ trust with her engaging and humanizing voice amid a bleak and violent world, helping everyone who finds her story to also find a sliver of hope.