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With the imminent release by Inanna Publications of my climate fiction novel Thalweg, I thought it might be fun to review the recognition its predecessor A Diary in the Age of Water has received since it was published in 2020. Both books are set in the same universe (near-future Canada impacted by climate change) and share some of the same characters. Thalweg is expected to release early 2027.
Over the years since it was published, A Diary in the Age of Water has received much attention by literary organisations and scholars.
A Diary in the Age of Water was honoured by the book review site Literary Titan, receiving a silver book award for excellence in literature that year. It also received Foreword’s bronze award for Book of the Year and was short listed for several other awards, including the International Book of the Year and the Miramichi Reader.
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Shortly after its publication, A Diary in the Age of Water was showcased in several art exhibits that followed the evolution of a created marsh. The City of Mississauga hosted Morphology, drawing on key quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water, mostly by the limnologist Lynna Dresden.
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Victoria Crozier acknowledged A Diary in the Age of Water as important ‘green science fiction’ work in her 2023 PhD thesis at the Liverpool John Moores University. Entitled: “The Brave New Worlds of Green Science Fiction: Ecocritical Discourse…” Crozier’s thesis explored the rise and impact of environmental science fiction with a focus on Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem while recognizing within that New Wave movement that she calls Green SF works other works such as The Waste Tide by Chen Quifan, Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta, and New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson and my own A Diary in the Age of Water.
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In his 2025 PhD dissertation on “Heterogenous Being” out of the University at Albany, State University of New York, Steven L. Ogden explored the dichotomous narrative separating human with nonhuman, drawing on A Diary in the Age of Water, along with other works of fiction (e.g., Richard Powers’ The Overstory) and nonfiction (e.g., Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees). Ogden’s thesis was entitled, “Heterogenous Being: The Inhuman and the Creative Scientific Aesthetic.”
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Odgen noted that “Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water brings the seemingly mundane and inconsequential (what Emanuele Coccia refers to as “residual” objects) to the imaginary forefront within creative-scientific writing.”
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By 2025, A Diary in the Age of Water had also become required reading at Memorial University for the course Feminist Practices and Global Change taught by Keif Godbout-Kinney. The course examines the connection between feminist theories and activism for social and political change on a global scale.
Praise by book reviewers has been generous. And copious reviews by readers on Amazon and Goodreads celebrate the book:
“If you believe Canada’s water will remain free forever (or that it’s truly free now) Munteanu asks you to think again. Readers have called ‘A Diary in the Age of Water’ “terrifying,” “engrossing,” and “literary.” We call it wisdom.”—LIISBETH
“An exceptional and thought-provoking dystopian fiction.”—LITERARY TITAN
“The prose here is beautiful and purposeful in the tradition of environmentally and socially minded novelists such as Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood.”—WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
“A chilling but believable portrayal of what might happen as fresh water becomes scarcer.”—MIRAMICHI READER
“One of the most important books of a generation.”—REEDSY REVIEWS
“Unsettling and yet deliciously readable.”—THE PRAIRIE BOOK REVIEW
“Munteanu excels at extrapolating today’s science into a stark vision of what we face in the next decades.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BOOKLIFE REVIEWS
“A book of genuine power.”—BROKEN PENCIL
“Munteanu has a rare gift of combining precise scientific terminology with rich, sensory descriptions… The prose moves with the fluid rhythm of a river, shifting from tense corporate intrigue to quiet philosophical reflection…A literary triumph that satisfies both the mind and the heart.”—GOODREADS Review
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The novel, told mostly through the diary of a limnologist, describes a world in the grips of severe water scarcity during a time when China owns the USA and the USA owns Canada. The diary spans a twenty-year period in the mid-twenty-first century of 33-year-old Lynna, a single mother who works in Toronto for CanadaCorp, an international utility that controls everything about water, and who witnesses disturbing events that she doesn’t realize will soon lead to humanity’s demise. A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and. an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
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Thalweg is a climate thriller that follows some of the characters from A Diary in the Age of Water (e.g. Daniel and Bobby-Jo). Here is the blurb:
Four homeless people on the run and haunted by loss. One haunted by her brother’s ghost. One by the memory of her murdered daughter. One by the treachery of his colleague. And another by her own treachery. Four haunted souls—lost and chased by a ruthless enemy—all destined to find Water’s thalweg. Each holds a disparate piece to the existential climate-water puzzle. Brought together by arcane forces, they will enact the next stage of humanity’s flowing evolution with water.
Thalweg
With the release of Thalweg, Inanna Publications intends to reissue A Diary in the Age of Water with a new cover, complimenting its partner novel.
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References:
Crozier, Victoria. 2023. “The Brave New Worlds of Green Science Fiction: Ecocritical Discourse in The Three-Body Problem and The Long Earth Series.” Doctoral Thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, UK. April, 2023. 265pp.
Munteanu, Nina. 2020. “A Diary in the Age of Water.” Inanna Publications, Toronto, ON. 328pp.
Ogden, Steven L. 2025. “Heterogenous Being: The Inhumanities and the Creative-Scientific Aesthetic.” A Dissertation submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 207pp.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020. You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
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