TC Boyle’s latest novel, Blue Skies, is a kind of Job story, except that the almighty God is man-made climate change, and Job is an American family. In the face of the looming consequences of air and environmental pollution, they try to be good and do something, such as switching their diet from methane-emitting cattle to garbage-eating insects. But all efforts to take responsibility for nature and their own species are severely punished by the god of extreme weather. Drought, floods and insect extinction are heaven’s dark answers to the nuclear family’s (more or less) sincere attempts to change human habits – at least those that are the cause of crop failures, epidemics, flash floods and coral bleaching.