Harare Review of Books

336 pp. August 12, 2025, Atria Books. Fiction.

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Having read Nick Fuller Googins’s near-future climate fiction The Great Transition (2023), I was keen to read this, his latest. If you’re in that position too, however, you’ll be surprised by The Frequency of Living Things as it has a completely different feel to it.

Emma and Ara are twin music celebrities, the frontwoman and drummer respectively of Jojo and the Twins. The eponymous Jojo is their younger sister and long-suffering caretaker (and enabler): she pays their rent and bills, manages many aspects of the band, and often runs the merch table at shows. She also dropped out of her PhD program to look after Ara when she suffered a medical setback. Ara is not over her troubles, and when she lands in jail, her sisters do what they usually do: Emma pressures her to use the experience for their next (and much delayed sophomore) record, and Jojo drops everything—again—to help. Meanwhile, their world-saving mom Bertie is, also as usual, nowhere to be found.

This is a family story with music at its heart. It deals with themes of loss and bereavement, addiction, and psychological issues like codependency and avoidance. Googins examines at length over the course of the novel each character’s peculiar wounds, what drives them, and how those things play into the family’s dynamics. Jojo sees and explains things from her perspective as a biologist and myrmecologist; Emma only wants to get their next album out; and Ara has never got over the pain of her past. Bertie the avoidant means well, and doesn’t realise how much damage she’s causing with her determination to make her girls independent. Her charity is all spent away from home, the novel implies.

It’s a story with a warm heart and a terrible tragedy at its centre. It’s the heroism of ordinary lives. If the novel feels long, it’s because you can feel Googins trying to tease out all of the possible implications of the arcs he’s set for each character. There are no surprises in that sense; everyone fits the image on their cardboard cut-out from beginning to end.

What The Frequency of Living Things does well is to show the ties between and toxic emotional bonds of, as Jojo would call it, the colony, the lengths to which each individual is willing or able to go to sustain the whole. It’s also, in the end, a tender portrait of what even a broken family can be.

Thanks to Atria Books/S&S and Edelweiss for early DRC access.

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